Ordinary Nothing

I was driving in a two-lane street, in a city, a couple of hundreds of meters before a turn into the highway. The turn to the highway is only accessible from the right lane, and so this is the lane I was driving in.

Another car was driving on my left. In the same speed as me, with its front about 20-30 cm ahead of mine. And it very slightly and very slowly veered to the right. At first I thought the driver was just not paying attention, and since the lane was wider than my car I moved slightly to the right myself, in order to give it room. But as we drove, the car kept getting more and more to the right, pushing nearly into my car. This was all going on for some distance, and not at a high speed.

Eventually, when I noticed I was bordering on getting out of the lane myself, I realized that the other driver was actually wanting to change lanes, into mine. Without signalling. When they knew I was there. They could have accelerated to get in front of me, or slowed down a bit to get behind me, but no, they had to start veering to the right directly into my car.

I’m not in the mood of crashing into another car just because the driver is a stupid jerk inexperienced, so I slowed down a bit, and let it get in front of me. All that without any signalling from that car.

We turned into the highway, and the single turning lane joined the two-lane highway. The car in front of me, with the driver who was so insistent on violently pushing me off, drove at a speed of about 15 km/h bellow the speed limit (which makes it about 20-25 km/h below the average driving speed at that road, but that’s another problem).

I didn’t spend too much time on being surprised as to why they didn’t just slow down before, but rather waited until the highway to turn into a turtle, and just decided to overtake.

I turned to the left (faster) lane, while signalling of course, and accelerated. I took a short peek at the other car and noticed that the driver was a 30-something years old women, busy talking loudly (I assume that it was loudly due to the vigorous hand gestures) to a man on the seat next to her.

As I moved forward I took another look at the rear-view mirror, and noticed that she also didn’t turn on the car’s lights. Which is required by law. Worse, which is just a very good idea when things are cloudy and visibility isn’t good, like it was at the time.

I sped on, and forgot all about it. Until about 3 minutes later… Guess who came blazing from behind, at a very high speed, overtaking other cars like a madwoman? That’s right, the selfsame driver in the selfsame car. And still without the lights…

March 9th, 2005 at 18:06 EET | Categories: Cars | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.