Hey, you.
Yeah, you. You know who you are. You’re the slimy waste of skin I saw tonight pulling a flatbed trailer loaded down with 20 tons of massive steel tubing. The traffic light on US HWY 90 had been red for at least five seconds when you blew through it at 65 mph. Yes, there were people waiting to cross that intersection. Luckily, they were safe and observant drivers who looked to see what was coming even though their light was green. If they hadn’t they’d probably be dead right now. 75,000 lbs of truck moving at highway speeds does tend to have that effect on stationary objects, you know?
You do know that you wouldn’t have waited more than 30, maybe 45 seconds at the most at that light, don’t you? Are you that fucking anti-social that you feel that someone’s life isn’t worth the amount of time it takes to heat up a microwave egg roll?
Or how about your buddy I saw literally a minute earlier trying to turn left across a divided highway while dragging a 54 foot trailer? He didn’t much seem to care that the back half of his trailer was covering an entire lane as he peacefully waited in the center. He probably didn’t even notice me swerving at the last second to avoid slamming into him, either. Of course, he knows that he should have turned right, driven an eighth of a mile until he found a place to turn around, and then gone left. But that would have taken two minutes of his precious time, wouldn’t it? Yes, better to put strangers’ lives in danger than to inconvenience himself. I mean, just look at all the shifting you have to do in those rigs!
Now before anyone accuses me of targetting truckers unfairly, I should point out that I work for a major truck line. I know the guys that drive these trucks and most of them are the safest drivers on the road. Some have gone over a million miles without a preventable accident. Assholes like the ones I saw tonight give ALL of these guys a bad name!
Truckers have a special responsibility to drive safely. Considering the weight they’re pulling, they’re essentially battering rams on wheels. They can crunch a car into an unrecognizable, twisted, burning mass of metal. They can kill an entire family in a fraction of a second.
I really don’t feel safe on the roads anymore. I would love to just walk to work, but I’ll be damned if I can find more than 100 feet of contiguous sidewalk in this entire fucking city…
sigh