Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Dear Lady on the Freeway behind me this morning

Hi. It's the Soapgirl in front of you. Please note a couple of things before I begin.

First, the sticker on my back windshield will likely give you the impression that I am involved with The Reno Roller Girls. This is true. It means that I like to skate. And I like to skate fast. So I'm not really going slow to piss you off.

Second, I drive a 12 13 year old 4 banger. This means that although I like to skate fast, and I also like to DRIVE fast, sometimes it takes my little jalopy a bit of time to get there. Especially when there is a slight incline. yes. Slight. My Honey has never liked hills, even when she was a new jalopy.

As we moved out of the traffic at what is known around here as the Spaghetti Bowl where, not far from the interchange there were at least two accidents, I noticed that you were riding my butt. Wow. You were close. My speedometer said just less than 65, but I was working on accellerating. I would have accellerated sooner, but, there was traffice stopped on the freeway which means I proceeded with caution. And boy, you were riding my butt. I didn't move over.

I wanted to move over to get out of your way, but you see, I learned in High School Physics that matter cannot occupy the same place at the same time. I think that's Newton's first law of dumbass or something, which, I'm guessing you didn't learn because you were doing your best to meld with my car. I will be a little crass and tell you that my car doesn't like to take it in the rear.

As soon as I passed the semi truck on my right (putting plenty of distance between us so that I didn't cut him off), I put on my blinker, checked my review (oh my! you are even closer!), checked my sideviews, and then checked over my right shoulder because my darling car has lots and lots of marvelous blindspots and I want to live a very long time.

Then I started to move over so that you could go on your merry way. BUT WAIT! This was not fast enough because by the time I started moving over, you sped up and got over to the right and started to overtake me.

Thankfully I saw you and swerved back into my lane and also got to see you give me a dirty look as you passed me up. If I hadn't swerved suddenly to the left, your left front fender would have been hit by my right rear quarter panel resulting in a pretty ugly accident that we both would have been lucky to have survived given the velosity and the angle of impact which likely would have put me in a spin and given my high center of gravity, maybe a flip, which would have REALLY sucked because we were on an overpass.

Did we hypothetically live??

No we didn't. Because at freeway speeds, there is no way that semi truck would have avoided hitting our cars had we avoided going over the railing. On a two lane overpass, even if one of us was in each lane, someone would have been hit by that semi. And maybe, because those things are WAY more delicate than they show in the Cannonball movies, he might have jackknifed.

As you drove off, weaving through traffic, I hoped that wherever you were going was worth your life and possibly someone else's, because by the time you left me in the dust, I was going about 70 mph and you were passing everyone else, which puts you at 90 to 100 mph.

Just wanted to bring it to your attention that your extreme driving techniques nearly killed me and maybe you.

You're welcome for the physics lesson, asshole.

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