WHAT THE F@#$ING F@#$ IS GOING ON AROUND HERE!?! *terrible driver rant inside*

"shop-teacher" (shop-teacher) 11/11/2016 at 09:20 • Filed to: Is the universe trying to tell me something?

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The universe is trying to kill the Roadmaster. Last week I was driving down a leaf-covered side street in the rain, with a load of groceries and an air compressor in the back. As I approached an intersection, my street had no stop or yield sign, when a pinheaded dip-shit in a silver Avalon (who was stopped at his stop sign) MADE EYE-CONTACT with me, and then puttered ever so slowly into the intersection. I had to lock up the brakes, sliding on wet leaves, he didn’t even seem to notice that I barely missed t-boning his dumb ass. Of course, everything in the back went flying, and the air compressor smashed the shit out of all my lunches for the next two weeks. THANKS FUCK-WAD!

Yesterday, on the way to pick up my daughters after work, I’m in the right hand lane of a busy main road doing 40 mph (aka, the speed limit), when a woman in a grey Odyssey decides that now would be a good time to amble out of a parking lot without even looking. I had to lock the brakes up so hard that the rear end briefly considered passing the front end before changing its mind. You would think the sound of screeching tires and a loud ass Buick horn MIGHT draw a glance, but you’d be wrong. I just hope there weren’t any kids in the back of that van that almost got killed, you stupid, vacant, drone.

On the way to work today, some idiot in an Eclipse managed to roll twelve feet back into my bumper. Look, I get it, learning to drive a manual trans is hard, but maybe after you’ve rolled, oh EIGHT feet back you hit the pedal in the middle that does the stopping BEFORE you roll into the giant Buick with it’s horn blaring. After all, that big angry guy looks like he might have a gun (I don’t), so not hitting his car would be a good survival tactic!

I’ve grown used to the idiots on their phones drifting into my lane and whatnot so much that it barely gets a mention anymore, but none of these idiots were doing anything but driving. They just sucked so monumentally at it that the Roadmonster nearly got written off twice in the last week. I’m just glad the only schmuck who actually did hit me was going very slow.

I guess I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.

diplodicus > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:26

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Every week is a bad week to stop sniffing glue.

Phyrxes once again has a wagon! > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:28

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From a fellow teacher I was expecting a rant about how the students at your school can’t drive, not random people.

“I didn’t see the school bus it must have been in my blindspot,” said by a student explaining why he didn’t have his car to a peer. Years later I still shake my head at that.

OPPOsaurus WRX > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:29

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upgrade your horn

EL_ULY > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:30

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damn dude, it almost seems on purpose

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:31

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Bro, when you have a Roadmaster, the other car is the crumple zone. Remember that.

shop-teacher > Phyrxes once again has a wagon! 11/11/2016 at 09:38

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I teach middle school, so if my students are driving that’s a whole different conversation!

shop-teacher > EL_ULY 11/11/2016 at 09:39

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It’s starting to feel that way.

shop-teacher > diplodicus 11/11/2016 at 09:39

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Good point.

Honeybunchesofgoats > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:41

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I’ll be honest, all of the love that I have for manuals disappears the moment I’m behind someone who clearly doesn’t know how to keep their car from rolling back towards me.

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:41

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I’ve been doing this thing where I don’t slow down any more than absolutely necessary and get within inches of the offending car. What’s alarming though is how many people still are oblivious.

Urambo Tauro > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 11/11/2016 at 09:53

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I’m like that too. I don’t want my own driver awareness to prove that the other driver did indeed have enough room to cut me off. No, I want them to shit their pants over the wreck they almost caused.

Of course, I’ll do my part to avoid a crash, but if the right-of-way was mine, then I want it to be a close one.

shop-teacher > Honeybunchesofgoats 11/11/2016 at 09:56

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Yep!

Urambo Tauro > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 09:59

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There’s something terribly unfair about good drivers having to be burdened with the responsibility of collision avoidance while the bad drivers roll on through.

I can’t help but feel a slight hint of satisfaction when a crash happens and STOPS the offending driver in their tracks. Of course, it’s a bittersweet victory when that crash involves an innocent party or other property damage.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Honeybunchesofgoats 11/11/2016 at 10:05

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I’ve heard there is a mystical, hand-operated stick between the front seats attached somehow to the rear wheels that holds a manual transmission car stationary while it is being pulled up on!

Mercedes Streeter > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 11/11/2016 at 10:19

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^^ This

I was even taught in Driver’s Ed to pull up on it a click or two if I’m starting up a hill.

shop-teacher > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 11/11/2016 at 10:49

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I do that sometimes if my kids aren’t in the car, and yeah, most people still have no idea what they did. In these two cases it was all I could do to drop the anchor and not stick two and a half tons of Buick up their asses.

shop-teacher > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 11/11/2016 at 10:50

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Sounds like magic!

shop-teacher > Mercedes Streeter 11/11/2016 at 10:50

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I’m genuinely surprised they mentioned anything at all about a manual transmission in drivers ed.

shop-teacher > Urambo Tauro 11/11/2016 at 10:52

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I’d be a liar if I said part of me wished I couldn’t quite stop for those two. They both looked like they had insurance.

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 12:12

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Kids in the car is a game changer for sure. You never know what some of those crazies will do.

shop-teacher > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 11/11/2016 at 12:37

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YEP!

RallyWrench > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 13:00

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Maybe the combination of the Buick’s size and awesomeness have generated their own kind of gravitational pull, drawing these hapless morons towards it?

shop-teacher > RallyWrench 11/11/2016 at 13:16

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Perhaps. Although I’m pretty sure the woman in the Odyssey that almost got it’s rear axle shortened and rearranged never even knew I was there.

RallyWrench > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 13:30

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Hard to be oblivious to gravity.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Mercedes Streeter 11/11/2016 at 13:43

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Other than parking, it wasn’t mentioned when I took my test, but was on a manual. I usually pull it up the equiv of a few clicks with my thumb holding the button in when starting on a hill.

Mercedes Streeter > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 13:49

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My driving instructor in High School is my all time favourite teacher. He was passionate about driving and saving lives, so he went the extra mile and taught us stuff that most of us would never use in real life, including driving a manual and including how to distribute trailer weight.

arl > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 14:29

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I have days when I fantasize about being an undercover cop. I would drive around in an old Roadmaster and pull idiots over for all the stupid crap they do.

Maybe we could start a new movement and get deputized by the local police department, sort of like the old west? We’d be deputized to pull over a-hole drivers and give out tickets to the unwashed, clueless masses. My drive home would be awesome if I could hand out $1,000 in tickets.

shop-teacher > RallyWrench 11/11/2016 at 15:07

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Newton’s laws are very unforgiving.

shop-teacher > Mercedes Streeter 11/11/2016 at 15:14

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That’s pretty cool.

My driving instructor was pretty good. He had a Porsche Speedster replica that he would to take to track days up at Road America. Rather than spout some dogmatic thing about driving from the text book, he would talk about the advantages and disadvantages of putting your hands at 10 and 2 vs 3 and 9, or two foot driving vs one foot driving, and then he would tell us to use whichever felt to most comfortable to us.

He was a really weird guy though. I never could put my finger on why he seemed so odd. I found out several years after I graduated that the wife he used to talk about (she was legally blind and couldn’t drive at night, so that was the context she would come up in during class) had been a student of his. They got married like three weeks after she graduated high school. The school couldn’t prove he had done anything wrong, so he got to keep his job.

shop-teacher > arl 11/11/2016 at 15:15

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Haha!

fryguy > shop-teacher 11/11/2016 at 22:31

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Me thinks this should be your next car. My dream is to have a vehicle such as the Roadmaster. I would fill the fenders with concrete and the front “bumper” would be be an iron bar with a diameter of around 8 inches. Do you still want to pull out in front of me without looking?

shop-teacher > fryguy 11/11/2016 at 22:54

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I like where you’re going with this.