Crazy Drivers

Today I "let" esteemed spouse drive my car. We had a couple of errands to run, and he seemed to be feeling wounded because he had driven the new car only a couple of times. I could tell he felt a bit tense. The new car is so much like the older Toyota, while being different in some ways, that he probably was wondering if he was hitting all the right buttons.

HE was doing fine, but the nuts with cell phones glued to their ears weren't. There's got to be some correlation between people who drive gigantic vehicles and people who don't seem to know that it takes two hands to drive. We watched this woman (one of these "I'm too pretty to be blamed for anything I do" perky types) as she was trying to maneuver her giant SUV into a parking spot. In and out. In and out. Turn the wheel a bit. Turn it another way a bit. All the while, she's yakking away on the cell phone. Honey, unless the person on the other end is giving you play-by-play instructions on how to park your Piggy Truck, set down the damned phone and watch what you're doing.

I nearly got wiped out on 44th Street on Thursday. The car directly in front of me slowed to turn into the driveway of a fast-food restaurant. A white minivan was in the driveway of the restaurant, waiting for a chance to pull out onto 44th Street. I don't know if that driver assumed that I too was going to make a McDonald's pit stop (even though none of my turning indicators was flashing to suggest that I might be), or if he/she assumed that there was time to pull out into traffic ahead of me, but out comes the nose of the white minivan, right into my path. I swerved, the minivan driver braked, and we missed each other, but it was a close one. Sometimes I feel as though there is a huge sign on my car that says, "I'M DRIVING A NEW CAR!!! HIT ME!!!"

Given the many hours I'm spending on the highway lately, I have had many chances to notice drivers who are distracted by cell phones and other things. The smokers are the worst. They have TWO addictions, only two hands, and the vehicle they are driving seems to qualify as their least important concern. I saw this one woman holding her cigarette in her left hand and her cell phone in her right hand. Either she had another arm that was connected to the steering wheel, or she didn't have a hand on that wheel. Mr. Nix, my driver's ed teacher back in high school, used to emphasize that drivers should always have both hands on the wheel. He demonstrated what would happen if the car hit a pothole, yanking the wheel sideways, and forcing control out of the driver's hands. I don't remember anything from biology class, but I haven't forgotten what I learned in driver's ed. Maybe that's the reason I've never had an accident and have received tickets only for non-driving violations. (Okay, I once got a ticket on NLU campus for driving 31 in a 15-mph zone, but that hardly counts.)

Baby, you can drive my car. Just leave your cell phone at home. Dr. S.