During my morning commute, I was driving in the center lane of a three lane freeway. My exit was coming up quick and the cars in the lane on my right were doing an elephant walk making it hard to merge over. When the sign for my exit came into view, I put on my blinker, waited a couple seconds, and merged into a smaller than desired space. My exit came up so quickly that I literally kept my blinker on and exited.
I'm curious to know their motivation there. I suppose you could rationalize that I should have gotten over miles ago. It's a pretty thin argument, but that might be the only leeway I would give in this situation. I put my blinker on, they knew exactly what I was doing, and getting off the freeway means that there was urgency in my moves. In no way was it even close to dangerous. This leads me wonder about the people in the car flipping me off...
Do they flip people off daily? They could be just looking for their scapegoat of the morning each morning- and today was my day.
Do they believe it is offensive for anyone to change lanes in front of them while driving? Maybe they are big NASCAR fans that any attempt at merging over is seen as a slap in the face. "Do you bite your thumb at me?" I do, sir!
While this was not the most interesting blog topic ever, feel free to chime in on any time you feel like you've been wrongly flipped off. When the world gives the general public big responsibilities (like driving massive machines that are essentially death robots on wheels), it is obvious that the majority of people will abuse the power and let it go to their overcompensating heads.
4 comments:
When you consider that a significant portion of our lives revolves around our ability to take several thousand pounds of metal, accelerate it to a speed greater than the maximum speed of any land based animal, and then maneuver in tight formation with hundreds of others, I'd say we get along surprisingly well. In fact, our fondness for recklessly piloting our deathbots should probably be getting us all flipped off on a daily basis.
You were wrong. Period. The longer that you wait to get over, the more likely you are to be flipped off because you have known for awhile that you need to get off but you waited until nearly the last possible second to do so. While the signal is nice, you still cut them off.
A good way to avoid the flip off is a big exaggerated wave to let them know that you were wrong but you appreciate them "letting you in" even though they weren't.
I used to flip people off all the time. I've mellowed with age though. Now I will just drive up next to the bad driver and stare at them until I pass. They need to know who is boss.
I'm not going to sit here and say I was "right" but I'm also not going to concede that I was "wrong." My issue was the amount of tailgating that happened to be going on to my right. Like JaMarcus Russell, I'm blaming everyone else.
I probably should have given the wave. That would've extinguished the problem quickly. Though, due to their reaction, I hope I made their day worse.
I agree with GMoney you knew you had to exit and waited until the last second. I'm sure you could have caught the next exit and made it to your destination in a reasonable amount of time. It bothers me that just because someone turns on their blinker they think they have a right to that lane. What makes it worse is when someone cuts me off and then I see that they are on their phone they get the Bird every time.
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