Guest Rant: Why Road Rage Is Necessary.

Hello folks,

So we have another guest ranter. Apparently there are so many of you that would rather not hear my opinion that you volunteer to offer up your own. I love it! One less thing that this lazy bastard has to get done this week. So Sarah Williams is going to share her feelings on most of us ;)

Cya in 7

Ok… Picture this: You’re driving down a street at 40 mph, and you pass a vehicle going slightly below the speed limit. Ok, you might be doing a couple over… or five. But let’s not split hairs here. What you see as you glance at this other driver actually sends a shiver down your spine, because you realize WHY it is that she’s not going the speed limit. She’s applying her mascara. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been driving around town in the 2C and had opportunity to see it. Seriously, she is into it, too. Rear view mirror tilted at some totally whacked out angle that would make a yoga instructor blush. She’s not watching where she’s going; she doesn’t even seem to be aware that she’s in traffic. Sweetie, I don’t care how cute you are. As soon as you open your mouth it won’t matter one bit. Trust me on that. All the makeup in the world won’t matter, so if you haven’t put it on by the time you’ve left the house, you may as well give it up.

I am also really sick of seeing every other driver with a cell phone at his/her ear. Your commute is not social hour. If you need to talk on the phone during the drive to/from work, get a head set, and get your hands on the wheel. And those of you who are living off my dime (welfare), YOU DON’T NEED A CELL PHONE. Until you can pay your own bills, get rid of it, and quit talking while you’re driving and chewing gum like a nasty heifer chewing cud. My favorite thing was when I saw a chick driving down the freeway with one hand on her cell phone, and her other hand on her cigarette… sure hope she had a 3^rd hand I couldn’t see.

But the scariest thing I have ever seen was leaving St. Luke’s downtown. We were on Broadway , and if my husband hadn’t had to go to a meeting after we had lunch, I would have hunted this driver down and screamed him stupid. We were sitting at a stop light, and I looked over, and a nice looking man dressed in a white shirt and tie was texting from his smart phone. He was driving a black Land Rover (Lyle rocks) and was talking to his passenger, another suit. When the light turned green, he slowly pulled away from the light. GREAT! You say, thinking he’s being cautious and watching out for red light runners coming from the other direction. You’d think that wouldn’t you? But you’d be incorrect. He was TEXTING as he was driving away.

Before I could stop myself, I did the unthinkable. I honked at him and wagged my finger at him (the INDEX one, thank you very much) like an 85 year old grandmother. My thanks for this gesture? He wagged a finger back. Yeah, not the index one. My husband was mortified that I’d even honked at him. I was infuriated. I wanted to follow him, but time was of the essence. I expect stupid crap like that from the teenagers who don’t know better, but this was a 30-something business man. Whatever he was texting couldn’t possibly be as important as a life if he’d caused an accident and killed someone, could it? Even if it was a multi-million dollar business deal, would it have been worth it if someone had died?

Other scary things I have seen out there? At Eagle and Overland: A guy driving while looking at the phone book… ok, sir? REALLY?? Program the number into your phone before you leave. If you can’t, at least pull into one of the million parking lots in that area. Why endanger lives?

On I-84 westbound, I saw a woman driving with a full size map open over her steering wheel. Hmmm… Let’s think about this for a second, shall we? Let’s take a compact car, put a stout woman in it, have her going a high rate of speed with lots of other cars going at high rates of speed. Add a few semi trailers, oh, and then, let’s give her a map of Idaho and find an obscure point on the map and tell her we’ll give her a million dollars if she can find that point while she’s driving. That better be the only reason she had that map out while travelling 70 mph down the freeway. Lady, get a Garmin. That’s what they’re made for. USE one. If you want to kill yourself, feel free, but don’t take the innocent bystanders down with you. Those of us who look and think, “OH boy, there’s a good way to thin the gene pool right there. PLEASE, for the love of all that’s holy, do not breed.” And you know, they always do… in large quantities, it seems, too.

Please, before you get behind the wheel of a vehicle, have your makeup applied, know where you’re going, have the number of your destination programmed into your cell phone, if you need to be clean shaven, take care of that ahead of time, but above all, get that stupid cell phone off your head. If you’re texting with it, and I see you, you better hope I have a lunch date with my husband and that he has an appointment afterward. Otherwise, I’m coming after you. And trust me, it will not be pretty.