It’s very much like those women who are brought up to believe that their one goal in life is to get married. And the moment they have achieved that status they can go to ruin. Get fat get lazy, get indifferent and simply let themselves indulge.
Same with drivers. Till they get their licences they are sweethearts on the road, all solemn and sincere and so intense as they give signals and drive straight and look ahead with their instructors giving them indications on how to maintain lanes and you’d never see such paragons of virtue.
Then, they get their licences one lucky day and the next thing you know they turn into monsters. For one, they swing from lane to lane like monkeys crossing bars, one two three, two, three, two one and devil take the cars behind. If they get into 4 wheel drives they have this misbegotten belief that they are bestowed with divine right to pass you from the right, squeegee through narrow spaces and if they can accomplish all this while dangling a telephone receiver from the nook of their neck all the better for them.
Sometimes you wonder how they got a licence to come on the road. I believe that licences should be given not only to those who happen to conspire with the Fates on a good day and get past the test but to those who are put on probation for a month and tracked by an instructor to see that they have highway courtesy in good measure. To just get your licence and not be tested for decorum and good manners on the road is to create a monster capable of crippling and killing innocents.
I had one of these mornings today where I got into the car, put on my seatbelt, checked my mirrors and fed myself into the traffic. One cretin decided it was sissy stuff at the first circle to wait for traffic coming from his left so he bullied his way in to the stream. Another cretin at the next red light wished to shift from lane one into lane three and since he could not leap over lane two he concluded that everyone else on the road had come out to see him perform his maneuver.
Without so much as a by your leave, this gentleman swerves indelicately across several dozen oncoming cars oblivious to their screeching protests then changes his mind and returns to the first lane, evidently having twigged that he had got his turnoff wrong and needed to a bit further before doing his bee pop a hop again. You won’t believe this, but four hundred yards down the road he actually double switched lanes again and sped off the trunk onto a side road without even attempting to switch on his indicator light. Why would he behave like this?
Because he thinks life is forever. Because traffic laws are for other people. Because he is brain-dead. I prefer the last. Continuing my saga to office I now come upon an amber turning to red.
So,I pull up because I don’t want to run a red. The car behind me gets all heated up at my reluctance to jump the red and with a rude blast of its horn leaps on the right lane and squeals past the blatantly red glow, scaring the daylights out of a pedestrian and causing the front row of cars coming from the crossroads.
They scrunch to a halt to let this idiot through and a hundred meters up the road he is jammed between two cars because there is a bottleneck. Now, think about it. He did all the wrong things, risked lives and created multiple hazards only to move one hundred yards ahead of us and then be part of us again. To what end. Some people, they don’t deserve a driving licence. At least not to drive.
