THE BIG RACE: The Turtle & The Car

There are some days that I just wonder what people are thinking when they are behind the wheel of a car. I only say this because it is obvious some of those who are driving certainly do not have their mind on the task at hand. Today, I witnessed an example of this very thing.

My in-laws came to visit today (they live two hours away), and we went out to eat. A few details are fuzzy here, as we went to a buffet and I completely stuffed my face and spent the next couple of hours in total misery. The detail that I am fuzzy over is whether this happened on the way to the restaurant, or on the way home. Oh….since you asked, I will tell you what happened.

I was driving along, driving defensively as I always do (you have to these days) and up ahead I noticed a car pulling out of a gas station. He was coming from my right, and was crossing the road to travel in the lane coming toward me. He had “plenty” of time to pull out and get into the on-coming lane of traffic and I knew that I wasn’t going to have to give him one ounce of brain power in having to make any decisions as to whether or not I might have to take any driving action on my part…or so I thought.

He exited the gas station, but he forgot he had an accelerator. Obviously he took his foot off of the brake, then just ever so slowly drifted across my two lanes. A turtle could have made it across the road faster. He had plenty of time to get across without affecting any of the traffic approaching him from our side. But…if I would not have applied my brakes and dropped my speed down to the point that I thought I was going to have to stop, I would have plowed right into his drivers side door.

Back to my original point…WHAT was he thinking? Why pull out so slow that people almost have to stop to miss him? He had more than ample time to get across the road safely, actually, several cars had time to get across, but I almost had to stop to avoid hitting him. Was this intentional driving behavior? Does he drive like this all the time? I have a lot of unanswered questions. It’s just lucky for that Iwas paying attention. Let’s just suppose that I would have been distracted by something just as he was pulling out. Wait, he had so much time to get across the road that I still would have been able to avoid hitting him. The point here though is that this should have never happened.

If we are going to get behind the wheel of a car, we should give some thought as to what we are doing while we are driving. I used to work on cars many years ago. I trained by working with a neighbor for several years after school before going to school for two years to become a mechanic. My neighbor was and is a wonderful man, a man of common sense and of excellent character. On rare occasion someone would bring in a car that didn’t seem to have anything wrong with it. I remember him saying more than once…“the only thing wrong with this car is the nut between the seat and the steering wheel.” Recently, those words rang out oh so true!

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