I am SO glad to be back!

NOT! This post may be subtitled "Rant Du Jour". Grrrrr.

Back in early September I posted "Driving Laws as understood by DC-area Drivers." That was one heck of a bad commute day. I actually experienced every one of those examples in that one day. Really!

Now that I am back from vacation, I realized why I needed the break, and it is amazing I am still alive to rant about this...

In the past two days, not only did I see all of the previously-posted examples of stupidity, I saw a few more, plus a few in combination. These drivers are nuts!

[Editorial comment: All the following references to #'s refer to the list in the original post.]

I saw someone try to move from the driving lane into the merge lane to pass someone. But - and this is #5, with a twist - he waited until the merge lane was already gone before he tried to swerve into it, putting him immediately on the shoulder. The doofus immediately swerved back into the driving lane, but (get this) re-considered and tried to get back onto the shoulder to pass the guy in front of him! I kid you not! He finally opted for tailgating the poor soul in front of him who was not moving much because the car in front of him was not moving much. Funny how that works.

Then, when I finally got to my exit off the mis-named 'express'way, I got in line like a good driver to exit. Of course, someone, who absolutely had to be somewhere faster than the rest of us, sped along in the driving lane to the very end of the solid double line separating the exit lane from the driving lane, and proceeded to cross the solid double line (a la #6), and drove on the left shoulder of the single-lane exit, parallel to the cars already lined up to exit, hoping someone would let him in. Most people did the bumper-to-bumper thing to cut him off ( I love when that happens!), but he eventually found some slob who let him in. Pooh!

Then someone decided he was going to merge into my lane without regard to the fact that I was there. I will give him some extra credit since he did have his directional on (must have been from out of state originally, see #1), but just because you use a directional, IT DOES NOT MAKE CARS DISAPPEAR! It is my understanding that directionals are for the driver to indicate their intent to make a maneuver; it does not (last I looked) give them the right-of-way, nor does it work magic on obstacles like other cars. I honked, and he kept a-comin'. I then layed on my horn, which made him swerve back into his own lane, speed up, and become someone else's bother. I also strained my thumb on the horn...bummer.

And last, but not least, I survived three parking lots. You see, I needed to stop and buy candy on the way home. Not for ME, please understand (I am one of those freakish people that can live without chocolate), but for my upcoming Holiday Stamp Camp. I promised the Ladies that any serving suggestion (which I call all my card and project samples) that shows candy or chocolate will, indeed, include the same candy or chocolate when they make their own at the Stamp Camp. So I had to get enough to go around, didn't I?!?!?!

Anyway, I had to hit three stores to find more of all the candy-type stuff I had bought to make my mock-ups. Can you believe when I asked one of the guys at the big-chain grocery store if he could tell me where they were hiding the candy corn, he responded that he did not even know if anyone even bought that stuff any more? BAH, I say, BAH! So off I went to the car to go to the store of last resort to see if they could save me, and as I started to pull out of my parking space, some ying-yang was going somewhere way more important than *I* was, so he was doing about 45 mph in the parking lot. I am surprised he did not nail someone, as you cannot even move in that lot without at least 2 other people trying to back out at the same time you are, creating the ever-popular bumper-car situation.

And THEN, to top it all off, as I was very close to escaping the dreaded parking lot, another yahoo (ying-yang's brother, I think), decided that the guy in front of HIM was going way too slow, and was stopping way too much, so he tried to wiggle around him to pass him, in the parking lot. Think NASCAR drivers doing the can-I-pass-now-can-I-pass-now wiggle thing and you'll get the right image. At one point the guy actually started to pass, and then he found out that the reason the front guy was stopping is that we were in a parking lot, at a grocery store, and, um, there are people that shop there, and these people need to get from their cars to the sidewalk to get into the store, so they were crossing the driving lane, in the crosswalk, and the guy in front had the nerve to stop to let the people cross the street. Can you imagine that!?!?! Sigh. I just watched and laughed.

But, an incident on the way home yesterday renewed my faith in the system. We have an HOV lane (High-Occupancy Vehicle) for 'rush' hour (HAHAHA, rush hour!) and more often than not, people in that lane have no passengers. Almost every day I think, "So where are the cops when you need them?" Yesterday, as some poor passenger-less fool tried to merge out of the HOV lane back into the regular driving lane behind me, I saw up ahead a motorcycle policeman on the shoulder. This policeman sauntered across the HOV lane, held up his hand to the guy behind me, and pulled him over. YES!!! Made my day.

It almost - almost - made up for the nuts I encountered today. There's always tomorrow. ;-)