I can only speak for myself, but when I do outwardly inexplicably nasty stuff like some of y’all have described it’s because I’m having a really bad day, and I can more safely take it out on strangers in parking lots and intersections than I can on people at work or at home.
Maybe it ain’t nice, but it’s the truth. It actually does make me feel better in a wholly unwholesome sort of way. Perhaps others are like that too.
I was leaving the Mall of America with my kids. Two kids, one double stroller, one middle aged woman, and shopping bags. For anyone who has never taken two toddlers shopping, you don’t get two toddlers and a double stroller into a car quickly.
Someone follows my wagon train (seriously, enough crap on a trip like this to cross at least the Smokey Mountains, if not the Rockies), out to my car and waits. And honks. And scares my kids. And I can’t get the stroller folded up because it jams, and then the stroller folds and I throw it in the trunk and get in the car to leave and I smell - stinky diaper. And I’m half an hour from home, so we have to go back into the Mall. So we take kids and diaper bag out (leaving the rest of the crap in the car) to change the diaper. And get yelled at.
Look…its my damn spot until I leave it.
Wait if you want to, but its a calculated risk that the person you follow out to their car is actually leaving in a timely manner.
:dubious: Have you ever considered practicing self-control? Or possibly even trying to alleviate your bad mood by doing something nice for someone?
Hey, if I didn’t already practice self control, I’d be poppin’ them folks in the nose. I can only do so much. 
On my regular route home, there is a place where we go from three lanes down to two. It’s pretty well marked, so that people in the far right lane at the traffic light can see that they are going to have to merge left.
I have lost count of the times that I’ve gone through the light in the center lane and had someone in the right lane lean on the horn for me to give way to them because their lane is ending. I’ve had people stomp the gas and cut over in front of me so close that I have had to slam the brakes on and nearly get rearended. I’ve been in the left lane and had people in the center lane cut in front of me to avoid being hit by someone doing that to them.
Sometimes it makes me wish I still carried a shotgun in my car.
This is what I do, too. Or, if I have to go, I ask my husband to drive me and pick me up later. The parking lot just makes me too angry. He’s more than happy to chauffeur, since it means he doesn’t have to actually do any shopping. For other times of year when I will drive there myself, I have my parking lot route planned. I will not drive on the south side of the building, ever, for example. That’s where the mean people park.
I try to go out of my way to be polite & courteous. If I’m having a bad day, I won’t be mean, but I do get impatient, and will point out when someone else has been rude, whether to me or to someone in the vicinity (cashier, bystander, whomever). I take some small pleasure in my own moral superiority on those days. 
I also imagine the horrible things that will happen to them because they are karmic-ly damaged – parking tickets, hours-long traffic jams, the shoe store not having the perfect pair in their size… petty crap like that, but punishment to fit the crime, surely!
This is what I do, too. Or, if I have to go, I ask my husband to drive me and pick me up later. The parking lot just makes me too angry. He’s more than happy to chauffeur, since it means he doesn’t have to actually do any shopping. For other times of year when I will drive there myself, I have my parking lot route planned. I will not drive on the south side of the building, ever, for example. That’s where the mean people park.
I try to go out of my way to be polite & courteous. If I’m having a bad day, I won’t be mean, but I do get impatient, and will point out when someone else has been rude, whether to me or to someone in the vicinity (cashier, bystander, whomever). I take some small pleasure in my own moral superiority on those days. I also imagine the horrible things that will happen to them because they are karmic-ly damaged – parking tickets, hours-long traffic jams, the shoe store not having the perfect pair in their size… petty crap like that, but punishment to fit the crime, surely!
There’s a good chance that OL was my mother, if you were in the NY/NJ area at the time! She’s done exactly this. Most recently, at a full service gas station (we have those still in NJ!). Some guy tired to head her off at the pump by circling around. They were nose-to-nose, each of them too far for the hose to reach their tanks. He got out and started yelling. She closed her windows, turned off the engine, and pulled out a book. He was able to inch his car up far enough to just get the hose in. The attendant told her the guy did this a lot, and asked her why she didn’t just move. She said that he was the one in the hurry, and it would be quicker for him to wait at another pump. If he was really in a rush, he’d move. He was just being a jerk with a big sense of entitlement, he wouldn’t.
Hamsters. Sorry.
This is ancient history. The interstate was under construction and signs were posted that the right lane ends in 3 miles. It was busy summer traffic and at about 1 mile the traffic was down to 10 miles or so an hour and stops. All the people with brains lined up immediately in the open lane a mile back from the construction. One vehicle zooms by in the right lane after we had waited for 15 minutes. They were waiting near the construction trying to force into the open lane, when we got to the construction. They passed maybe 15 minutes before. Nobody let them in, because everybody was pissed off with them and remembered them zipping by. Everybody was crowding up to a couple feet behind the other cars, when near them so they couldn’t squeeze in. I hope they had to wait for a couple hours.
Perhaps you should consider changing your coping mechanism to the solution I find most effective:
Go out of your way to be nice to other drivers.
Yes. When I’m driving and feeling rushed, frazzled, grouchy or otherwise antisocial, I make it a point to let other drivers pull out from side streets, change into the lane ahead of me, get past me if they want to go faster, and so forth. I keep an eye out for pedestrians waiting to cross the road and wave them on.
Why? Because it makes me feel good about myself, and that feeling good relieves the feeling bad, pushes it aside, lightens my dark mood. What was a frown on my face becomes a smile. It may be marginal the first time or two, but the more I show courtesy to others, the better I feel inside.
You really ought to give it a try. Your blood pressure will thank you.
The friday before Memorial Day a woman was buying a lot of pop and chips, and such. The cashier asks “Are you having a party?”. The woman gives her a rude remark to the effect that she not having a party. She walked away and I told the cashier “Everybody else is invited to the party, but we didn’t ask her.” I wonder why she needed a cart load of pop and chips, if she wasn’t having a party. It must have been for that new pop and chips high carbs holiday diet.
One outa a hundred? Where do you live, I’m packing!?!
Meh. I’m cranky and impatient on a good day. Give me a reason to spit on your grave, and I’ll ensure your there shortly so that I have the opportunity.
You have to wonder if these people were dropped on their heads when they were little. I mean, they know that you are going to be holding your car keys when you get out of your car, and you know where they’re parked, and you know that they’re going to be away for a while…
Years ago in Inman Square in Cambridge, someone unleashed a torrent of invective against me. The strange thing is that they probably thought that they were correct. In parallel parking, common courtesy dictates that when waiting for a parked car to leave, you park behind that car with your blinker on. You shelter that car from traffic, they are able to merge into traffic without interference, and you can move forward to back into the space. Seems simple enough. So here I was getting into my car, and a couple of teenage girls pull up in front of my car with their blinker going. They then look back at me and gesture me to move out. Great. Now I have to swing out not only around the parked car in front of me, but around their car as well. I shook my head, and pointed them to park behind me. They started getting angry and more vehement. What the hell, I still had time on the meter, so I just sat there, pointing them to park behind me. They finally moved back, but only so that our windows were opposite. I wish that I could say that they were creative with their cursing, but it was just as mindless as their parking skills. Just ten feet more back, and they would have had a space, but that was not to be. They zoomed off, and the next driver behind them observed parking courtesy and was rewarded with a space.
The rudest behavior I’ve seen is at All You Can Eat Buffets. Take someone who is rude to begin with, and watch what happens when they’re hungry.
It’s not only the parking lots of malls and department stores; there’s plenty of rudeness inside, too. You’ll see two or three people chatting at a single spot right in the middle of the damned aisle for at least 10 minutes or more at a time. I used to write this off to mere cluelessness, but now I’m not sure. How can you not notice people waiting for you to move, then back tracking to another aisle to get around you? A couple of times I’ve excused myself and asked them to move so I could pass, only to be met with stares.
I guess they figure while they’re standing there, they own the territory.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
Good thing to know that the person who was the least involved (the poor lady trying to leave her parking space) didn’t have some reason to leave quickly, like an emergency or something. I mean, I just cannot imagine believing that even if the point got made to the prick in the pick-up that he couldn’t always force his way, that this was a lesson that needed to be administered to those who’d already gotten it. Nor that one would think he would never behave that way again. Perhaps the next chance he had allowed him the right to feel vindicated in even more aggressive behavior. 
Something to consider on how much we want to waste on attempting to mold someone else permanently, while against their will, in a likely harmful (to yourself) and pointless manner. Your own health is more important, I’d think.
Anyway, I would guess by at least a couple of the responses in this thread (and that I’ve seen elsewhere on the board), that the perpetrators of these attitudes don’t feel they’ve done anything wrong. Or they are justified. Or something. I know in my own circumstances, I’ll go out of my way to give the benefit of the doubt when there obviously isn’t any, simply due to what I’ve been through myself. In my never-ending quest to beat agoraphobia, for example, I’m constantly fucking up my driving (when I do it, that is – I usually don’t have to worry about too much road rage in my living room) and praying, as I wave contrition to the other drivers around me, that I’m cut some slack and they don’t think my actions are intentional. Because they are not. Of course I try to compensate by being the World’s Largest Drippy Sweet Idiot, but I’m sure you get my drift. Perhaps for those who don’t fall into one category or the other, they are just best left avoided in the hopes that we aren’t their catalyst for a foray up into a university bell tower.
That said, I do appreciate Creaky being honest on another outlook that I’d never considered. Truly, that does make sense in the way that repercussions are different from that of those who know us. I certainly don’t condone that, if nothing else but for his/her own blood pressure, but I am grateful of another opportunity to assume the best (IE: it’s nothing personal, just a bad day) when it also helps to make my life any easier.
I appreciate your kind response, and I think it’s a good idea. I also reckon my shrink would heartily agree. However, what y’all don’t know is that years ago, before I started therapy and anger management, is that I did actually start real fights and yell at people and jump up and down and throw things and stuff. So where I am now, in terms of the antagonistic crap I do, is a vast improvement. It’s honestly better than what I really want to do to people who annoy me, or whose looks I don’t like, or whatever. That would no doubt land me in prison. :o
Frankly, my best coping mecahnism at this point is to come home and have about three vodka martinis and do serious internet shopping. Honestly, that does take the edge off of life in general! 
Yikes! :eek: I’m glad I never ran into you (heh) before you started working on this. :eek: :eek: :eek:
Kudos to you for making so much progress. How about taking another step forward, though, and trying my approach? Not when you’re really boiling, that would be too abrupt a change from where you are, but when you’re just simmering? You might be pleasantly surprised at how effective it can be. Random acts of kindness can be an amazing tonic for the soul.
I’m reminded of the time when I waiting for a bus near a highway overpass when I noticed a pickup on the overpass reversing in the breakdown lane. Apparantly the brain-dead driver decided that traffic on the 14th Street Bridge into DC was too heavy and that it would be better to just head back to the nearest onramp.
I didn’t have a cellphone at the time so I decided to try to get the attention of the next cop who went by but that didn’t work.