I’ve had a near-death experience. I’ve driven on the
freeway.
Now for those of you who drive the freeway every day, this is a
normal occurrence.
I’ve had a near-death experience. I’ve driven on the freeway.
Now for those of you who drive the freeway every day, this is a normal occurrence. You cheat death weekday mornings and afternoons and sometimes weekends. But for me, this was a scare on a par with walking across a cable strung between two buildings – with no net. And one of those two buildings is the Empire State building.
It was horrifying, to say the least.
First of all, nobody just drives anymore. Everybody on the road has to be multi-tasking while driving. Now, multitasking would be a good thing – if you weren’t actually in command of thousands of pounds of steel that could crush innocent bystanders the minute you careened off the road.
Driving is a single task activity in my book.
But I must be in the minority on this, because not one driver on the freeway was simply driving. Several, in fact, were talking on their phones. Look, I don’t live in the fast-paced working world anymore. But is anything on Earth so incredibly important that you cannot wait until you are in the office to talk to people about it? Is the world going to come to an end if you don’t save it by making a call from your cell phone on 101 where the average speed of the average car is now 80 miles per hour?
I think not.
And even the people who weren’t talking on their phones were doing something other than driving. There were several women driving while applying mascara. How can they do that? I have never once managed to put mascara onto my eyelashes without poking myself in the eye. And I’m not even driving. While I put on my makeup, I’m standing in my bathroom. So how do these women train themselves to put gunk on their lashes without taking out an eye – or the minivan next to them – and still manage to drive?
Of course, once they are done with their makeup, they can join the rest of the drivers, who are enjoying breakfast, coffee and a newspaper. How many hands do these people have? I can’t handle coffee and a newspaper without some annoying distraction like driving, so I figure everyone on the road is either a multi-handed alien or a professional juggler. And let’s not even get into the reading thing. If they’re reading, when are they looking at the road?
One woman was weaving in and out of her lane so much I thought she was drunk at 8:45 a.m. Turned out she was just applying a second coat of Passion Pink to her nails. She nearly took out the Toyota next to her – and then had the temerity to flash a freshly painted fingernail at the poor driver. I’m not sure, but I don’t think she was wondering what he thought of the color.
The worst part of this is that Harry, who commutes every day, tells me that this is normal. In fact, he assures me that he has seen worse. I don’t even want to know what worse would be. It’s bad enough that I am on the road for one millisecond with these people.
Didn’t they take the same Driver’s Ed classes I did? In my driving school, we were lectured about the evils of turning the radio up too loud. I can’t imagine what they teach now.
So I guess it’s the backstreets for me. I’m just not talented enough to eat, drink, talk and polish while I’m doing a little thing like driving.
