23 July 2002 You Give Me Road Rage Anyone reading this ever encounter road rage? I have to admit to suffering from it - well you can't clock up about a thousand miles a week without getting exasperated, but I tend to limit it to muttering obscenities to myself quietly while pondering if some people managed to get their driving licences from a lucky dip barrel. I mean we all make mistakes when we're driving because there isn't a single person on this sweet planet who doesn't make a mistake at some point. I had a fantastic crash about four years ago, for example. Fair enough, the guy in front was indicating that he was turning left even though he was turning right and I slapped straight into him as I was trying to overtake, but I shouldn't have been trying to overtake at a crossroads. I held my hands up to making a dumbass mistake, nobody was hurt and cars can always be repaired. A couple of years later a guy backed into me on the forecourt of a garage, managing to take out one of my headlights. It was a simple mistake - he was in a hurry and wasn't concentrating. I was apologising left, right and centre because I had to call the police and explaining that it was only because I had a passenger in the car at the time (her husband had went into the shop to get cigarettes) and as a taxi driver I have to notify the cops if there's a collision. Still, I said to the traffic cops who came up to the scene that I hoped they wouldn't take any action against the other driver and I'm glad to say they didn't. The next day I went and got a second-hand light unit from the breaker's yard, the guy paid for the repair and we parted on good terms. Anyway, on to what happened this evening. I'm sitting at the traffic lights and there's one car in front of me. The lights are green but the driver isn't going anywhere. Now this is rush hour at a busy junction - she (yes, it was a woman driver) had pulled over the crossing and was now dilly-dallying waiting for the rest of the traffic to clear before she'd go further. I'm not explaining it too well, but trust me, she'd have been better just getting the hell out of the road. So I wait......and wait.......and she still won't bloody move so I toot my horn. All hell breaks loose then. She starts bouncing around in her seat, flapping her arms and making various hand gestures. My passenger (a guy I taxi on a regular basis) starts laughing at the display and I return her gestures with one I know myself....as the Americans say, I flipped her the bird :-D Oh dear.....she bounces out of the car (which is still sitting slap bang in the middle of the junction) and starts screaming. I couldn't help it, I just started laughing too because she looked like such a pillock and my passenger is almost in hysterics at the display. So with a big dramatic gesture she waves a pen at me and starts writing my registration number down on her hand announcing: "I work for CID (plain clothes police) and you're fucked". I was laughing so much I barely managed to tell her that when she learned how to drive properly she could start shooting her mouth off. What could she do? She had to crawl back into her car and move off. Now my point is what good did that little display do her? She only stressed herself out more and it wasn't doing me any harm. I doubt very much she's a cop and even if she is, so what? I'm a legal taxi driver. For that matter I'll be quitting work in about eight weeks time to start into my final year at uni, so I'm not particularly worried. Ah, the world is full of weirdos, isn't it?
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