Road RageLast week I had to stop a guy attacking another one in the middle of the road - one had run the lights whilst on the phone and the other had objected. I actually had to take the attacker's car keys out of their car and tell him he wasn't getting them back till he calmed down.
Looking back on it, I was lucky I was feeling all parental and in control or the situation could have panned out very differently.
Have you lost it on the roads, or have you been on the recieving end of some nutter?
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chthonic, Thu 12 Oct 2006, 21:31)
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Silly thing to do...M25, 6:30 on a Thursday morning, riding my bike down to Camberley for a course at a well known hardware manufacturer. I'd been doing the journey on and off for a couple of weeks so have gotten comfortable with the route and with the level of traffic/congestion. Traffic is doing aboout 45mph and I'm happily filtering through between middle and right hand lanes at about 50/55mph. Then I spot her. She's in a typical rep-mobile mondeo/vectra/passat/whatever and apparently not actually paying a great deal of attention to the road. I'm being very careful looking for people changing lanes and she looks like she's going to change lanes for about a mile, keeping moving from middle lane towards outside and then back again after touching the cats-eyes. Eventually I decide to go for the overtake (a Porsche of all cars had pulled over as far as he could to the right to allow me through!). When I drew level, however, I noticed the reason for the vagueness of her driving, she appeared to be reading. On closer inspection, it turned out she was doing a crossword!
Red Mist set in, I decided that I should draw her attention to the fact that someone on a motorbike had drawn alongside and had seen what the hell she was doing. Instead of revving loudly or perhaps beeping the horn, I decided that it would be more effective to tap loudly on her window. She looked up in utter panic and wrenched the steering wheel, blindly swerving the car across her lane.
Fortunately for me, she swerved to the left, rather than to the right. After gaining some composure she then sat with a look of abject horror that someone had seen what she was doing. I, on the other hand, waved two fingers at her in an angry manner before speeding off to find the first exit from motorway where I allowed my heart rate to drop below 250.
It never occurred to me for one second that she would have reacted so violently, and that it was a 50/50 chance of her swerving straight into me and taking me off the bike and under the wheels of several nearby cars and lorries.
Still ride the bike, still filter through traffic, still look out for idiots, no longer attempt to scare them to teach them a lesson.
(, Mon 16 Oct 2006, 15:52, Reply)
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