Big-ass SUV vs. Weedeater
I was driving from Richmond VA to Myrtle Beach SC last Thanksgiving with my kids to see my parents for the holiday. My girlfriend had my sons in her car, while I had my daughter in mine (there are too many of us to drive six hours in one vehicle).

My car is a 1999 VW Jetta TDI which has seen better days, thanks to my girlfriend's daughter. I had bought it from her for $500 because it's a diesel, but she had run it for a while without oil- so the turbo is shot, and it has little to no compression on two cylinders. Result: if I get on the expressway with it, I hold my foot to the floor and keep it there, and I kinda keep up with traffic. Due to the ruined turbo making a high-pitched whine and its complete lack of power, I call it the Weedeater.

So here I am, driving with my daughter in the Weedeater, trying to drive along I-95 with all the holiday traffic and the tractor trailers (lorries, for you English types), and doing my best not to either block traffic or get stuck in a knot of cars behind an even slower-moving vehicle. My daughter is not a small girl and I'm over 200 lbs, so the Weedeater was struggling. As I'm going along I find myself coming up rather fast on a slow moving tractor trailer, so I get in the left lane to pass him-

-and then find that we're going up a hill, and I don't have enough power to do so.

I said a few bad words, but as I was still going slightly faster than he was, I knew that I should just stick with it, especially as there was now a line of cars behind me, led by a very large SUV driven by a rather fat middle-aged man with a beefy red face who was now glaring at me in my mirror. I was in truth trapped there, unable to shift lanes to let them by without slowing down a lot- which would have been rather dangerous in that traffic and besides, I was still driving at the speed limit. It took about two minutes, but I finally got past the truck and pulled into the right lane to let the other cars by.

As soon as I did, Beefy Face swerved toward me, leaning on his horn and giving me the finger, just before jamming hard on the gas and roaring off at about 85 mph.

Too bad his big-ass SUV was so high off the ground, or he would have noticed that directly behind him was a state trooper. I think he was pulled over in about a quarter of a mile. Speeding, improper lane change, tailgating... I imagine that his Thanksgiving was spent in a drunken rage.

My daughter was still grinning about that when we arrived a couple of hours later.

Length and girth? Probably a hell of a lot more than Mr. Beefy Face has, given what he drives and how he drives it...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 30 Apr 2007, 18:12, Reply)