My wife drives me crazy with vague warnings – “Careful! Careful!” – careful of what, exactly? There are a lot of things that might be out there to be careful of. I don’t know whether I should keep doing something, or stop doing something, or look for a car behaving funny, or an animal or a child on the street. Details! I need details!
Oh yes this! I swear I cannot wait for the Google car to hit the streets. Otherwise I may take to gagging him and tossing him in the back of the hatchback.
Mrs G and I have a routine that helps driving stress when either of us starts to backseat-drive to annoying levels (from the Muppet Movie).
“Bear left”
“Frog right!”
snicker together all pleased with ourselves
Weirds out any of our passengers though.
One she does as a passenger, though, is suddenly exclaim “Oh my god!”, “What the hell?”, “Stupid!”, “You got to be kidding me!” causing me to look around wildly for danger.
It usually means she just figured out a personalized plate or bumper sticker joke she’d been silently spotting.
I’ve used all (and I mean all) major known curse words because the SO doesn’t know when to STFU till I use them to indicate such. And keep in mind, this isn’t me being a bad driver, its me being more cautious than she would be. I prefer not to get into an accident thank you very much.
She gets mad if I ask “hey, is it THIS right or the NEXT right?”. OTOH, she’ll act like the world fucking ended because I went one block too far and had to backtrack in a suburban neighborhood.
Breaking the key off in the ignition is probably in the near future.
My pet peeve is people who have this as a pet peeve. Traffic actually moves faster if everyone uses both available lanes as long as possible and then merges together one car at a time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in real life because most people merge early and think, “Who’s this jackass?” refusing to let late mergers in. Google “zipper merge.”
I’m not talking about using the two lanes until there’s only one lane. I get that. I’m talking about the shoulder. A zipper has two sides, not three.
Wrong. The zipper part is right but once the zipper is closed the one going around it is the one who slows traffic. It matters not when the zipper closes but whether one ignores when it closes and then forces the whole line to slow for his late ass at a later point just so he can be ahead by that many cars. It’s akin to breaking line after everyone else has merged. Also the main thing which slows the whole line has nothing to do with merging but that the line can only move as fast as the slowest rubber necker who has passed the bottle neck. I won’t let you in because you should be able to figure this out on your own and not be a rude line breaker.
Oh God - please let us not do the zipper argument again.
It’s really very simple. Just zip when everyone else does whether that is at the end or right when you see the sign. At the end is dangerous though because you have less time. Whatever you do don’t blame the zipper for not opening for your tardiness.
My husband of nearly 50 years and I have this (mostly) worked out. It took a while.
On giving warnings: We have agreed, finally, that if the passenger sees a hazard or a necessary turn, and is not sure the driver has done so, he/she is allowed to point it out. Better an unnecessary warning than a wreck. The pointing-out of turns was agreed upon after he once drove 20 miles past an exit while I kept completely silent, having been hollered at for pointing one out before.
He used to tailgate, a lot. I would ask him not to and he’d say something like “I know what I’m doing.” One time I posed him the following: If you had a really big dog, and a guest was afraid of it even though you were sure it was friendly, would you force your guest to sit next to it? Answer: No, of course not. Well, when you drive that close to the car in front of you it makes me very anxious and by the end of the drive I have a stomach ache and feel awful the rest of the day. Could you please just not do that in consideration of my comfort? It shows that he’s really a nice person that he went along with it.
Constant nagging on every action, however, is not allowed. I more than once in the early days said “Do you want to drive? 'Cause if you do, I’ll pull over.”
He got a lot more trusting of my driving after I got my pilot’s license, figuring if I was capable of flying an airplane I was probably OK in a car.
Okay, I misread left shoulder as left lane. Definitely justified irritation.
Not sure how much you are exaggerating here, but if I came to pick you up for a date this would piss me the fuck off for two reasons
- If I offered to come to you house for a date - that means that I am offering to drive, otherwise you come and pick me up
- I happen to enjoy driving - it’s got nothing the fuck to do with being emasculated or not, and if you imputed such shallow emotions onto me I would think you were some sort of nasty control freak.
Why?
Because it would be silly to drive around in circles and figure-8s for hours using a car.
I think I had trouble with the concept of where the car was on the road in relationship to the lines on the pavement. Seems like I hung too close to the center line or perhaps too close to the right line. And I couldn’t park straight. So I think Dad wanted to pound into my head the spatial relationships between me, the car, and the road.
I found that his little Wax On Wax Off lesson did help me learn how to keep the car in a straight line and it taught me how to choose my line through a turn. I think it also gave me a sense of how much to turn the wheel to get the car to do this or that. Also, just having him spend that kind of time with me in the car gave me a confidence boost that I really needed.
BTW, that was a snowy day in Ohio when I got that driving lesson, so there was a really fun bit where he asked me to accelerate up to about 30 mph and then slam on the brakes on ice. First, he just made me sit through the skid so I’d know what it felt like (no danger of hitting anything – I was in the middle of a huge parking lot). Then he taught me how to steer out of a skid, so I think all of his methods went to giving me experience and confidence in handling the car.
Which is why I sometimes suck it up and bite my tongue and just get in the guy’s car. Most people who enjoy driving are pretty good drivers – I wouldn’t assume you’re terrible if I’ve never been in the car with you.
I have one friend who’s a terrible driver, so I just go pick him up without any comments with respect to his masculinity. There’s another one who is a bad stick shift driver, but I keep my damn mouth shut to be polite. Sometimes we’ve had plans to do something on his side of town, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to drive west just to pick me up and then backtrack east to our destination, which might be east of his place. So, in that case, I picked him up, but usually I let him drive or meet him there and swallow my tongue over the gawdawful country music he plays in his car.
Well, that’s just fun. 
When starting out driving on questionably icy roads, I often give a hard brake (with no cars around) to find out how bad it is.
It was fun! Of course, I got the lesson on how to do doughnuts, which was a blast.
About the third or fourth driving lesson from my
Dad, 1957, was parking on a 30° slope with the engine off and the parking brake on. The test was to start the car which had a standard transmission and advance up the hill with no roll back.
All of my of Dad’s 7 kids can back a boat trailer like a champ.
MrScotch and I are very good about driving with each other.
I have trouble with left and right though, so I have had to teach him to give and receive directions in the “My way, your way” format. If I am directing and he is driving, and we need to turn left I will tell him “turn your way at the next traffic light”.
Works for us…