Adventures in Driving

This place terrifies me on a daily basis.

People here can't drive. Actually, they just don't drive well. Ok, they're maniacs.

Coming from the west, traffic through Pennsylvania is sane, even nice. People are courteous, for the most part. Then you hit Maryland and everyone turns crazy. The craziness continues down into Virginia. I can only imagine what DC is like. In my mind's eye I see blind clowns driving unicycle into monkeys, who then get mad and throw poo everywhere.

Maybe I need to have my mind's eye checked.

Some of the worst drivers have the largest vehicles. It's like having an SUV or ginormous pickup truck gives you the right to drive anywhere at any time.

Just this weekend I had someone in a through lane stop and try to backup to the end of the turning lane to try and turn. People run stop lights and stop signs all the time. I had one coworker advise me to just change lanes when necessary --don't signal, otherwise the other drivers will never let you in.

And did I mention the hysteria that happens when it snows? The entire area shuts down. Three inches of snow and the sky must be falling.

What really amazes me is the police presence. Every day I drive Eunice to school I see at least one police car or motorcycle, usually more. I'm not terribly good at spotting the unmarked cars --I'm sure there are several of those. Yet with all this police presence, the driving is still awful.

I'm reminded of our old Doberman, Spock. Spock was huge, even for a dobie. He eventually discovered that he could vault over our 4 foot tall fence without any real trouble.

We tried to break him of this habit in a number of ways. We actually got a special collar that would give him a little shock whenever we pressed a button. The idea being that we would shock Spock when he did something bad, like stand on or jump over the fence. The downfall of this plan was that it required constant supervision.

Naturally, all this collar taught Spock was that he shouldn't stand on or jump over the fence while we were watching.