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Tag Archives: anger management

Pet peeve: Unreasonable drivers

I spend a fair amount of time on the road so I see a good amount of stupid driving and stupid drivers (as well as perfectly good drivers, but we aren’t talking about them in this post).  Some are just reckless, some are distracted, some are completely clueless, and some…are just plain unreasonable.  And it’s that last category of drivers that really irritate me.  The other types of drivers I can stand…from afar.  I may find them briefly annoying and/or dangerous, but once I’m far enough away from them, they don’t continue to bother me.  But those unreasonable drivers…

So, what do I mean about unreasonable driving?  Well, it’s not really a particular style of driving.  It’s not necessarily aggressive driving, although sometimes that’s part of it.  It’s that these people are probably unreasonable in their day to day lives as well and it happens to be that they are driving near me and thus I perceive them to be unreasonable drivers.

So…what do I mean about unreasonable people?  You know the type.  Sometimes you see the woman arguing heatedly with a shop clerk about something inconsequential and has to have her way.  Or it’s the guy who is really demanding and condescending and rude to the wait staff for no reason other than he perceives that it makes him look powerful.  Or the client the demands to include things outside the agreed scope of the project and refuses to give you more time or money to do it.  You know, unreasonable people.

So, I assume when these people go driving, they keep their unreasonable ways.  For example, there was a woman driving a luxury SUV behind me when we were very stuck in traffic.  So stuck that we were probably moving only 10 ft every 30 min or so.    You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.  It was really bad traffic.  We were also in the left lane so there was no place to go.  And what did she do that was so unreasonable?  She would honk.  Any time I let more than 3 ft of space get between the next car and me.  Three.  Feet.  And when I would look back in my mirror at her, she’d be gesticulating and pounding on her steering wheel.  I’m sorry, but in the grand scheme of things, being 2 ft closer to your destination when you’re stuck in stuck in such bad traffic doesn’t make much of a difference.  If we were in the right lane and I only needed to move a few feet so that she could get around me into the right turn lane, I would think she was a jerk but I’d do it, because I know how frustrating it is when you only need a few more inches of space to get to a lane you’d like to be in.  But we weren’t in that situation.  And she was being completely unreasonable.

Another example?  How about the guy in a subcompact who would flash his high beams at me and put on his blinkers to try and get me to move over into the next lane so he could pass me?  Now then, the US has standards on the use of the passing lane.  You generally pass on the left lane and slower traffic should keep to the right.  And this is in relation to the speed of the traffic around you, not the posted speed limits.   So, if the traffic around me was moving faster than I was driving, then definitely I should have moved over to the right and let the guy pass.  BUT.  I was traveling with traffic.  And I was traveling faster than traffic in the lane to the right of me (we were in the leftmost lane).  And I was holding distance between the car in front of me who was traveling at about the same speed I was.  And this guy would not have any of it.  He kept flashing his high beams at me.  And I finally did after I passed one particularly slow moving truck.  And he raced forward past me by about 1 ft when he had to slow down again.  Why?  BECAUSE TRAFFIC WAS MOVING AT THE SPEED I HAD BEEN DRIVING.

What I found even more irritating is that after he passed me, he proceeded to repeat his whole performance to the car in front of him.  He may have been doing that the entire trip, slowly bullying other cars out of his way.  I think he managed to bully that other driver too, and then what?  Same thing.  He got may be a foot in front of the other car and had to slow down again BECAUSE TRAFFIC WAS MOVING AT THE SPEED I HAD BEEN DRIVING.  If he kept at it, he would have had to do that for a line of like 5 cars because we were all traveling at the speed of traffic around us.  I do not understand why he was being so unreasonable.  And at the very least, he could have just started weaving like any other aggressive and impatient driver would have.

THE. ANNOYED.

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Et voilà!

I’m kind of a stickler for spelling and to a lesser extent, grammar.  And I definitely have some spelling pet peeves.

Loose?  As in you lost something?  NO.  It’s “lose.” One O.  One.  Yes, I know why you might think there are two O‘s in “lose.”  I’m sorry that English is a weird language and breaks pretty much all of its own rules.  But you went to school for a reason.  Please remember that there is only one O in “lose.”  So things happen and you lose your pen.  But your dog runs loose in the yard.  There’s a difference.

Definately?  NO.  Definitely.  It’s kind of like infinite, but more defined.  Just…remember how to spell the word properly.

There/their/they’re?  Really??  And also it’s/its?

Why are these things?  I know you went to school.  You may have even had to pay for it.  Why didn’t you even remotely try and get your money’s worth of education?

Those are only a few of my spelling pet peeves.  The loose/lose example probably bothers me the most.  But there’s one misspelling that’s quickly making its way up to the top of the list, that being “walla.”  Don’t know what that is?  That’s because it’s not spelled anywhere close to how it’s supposed to be spelled.  The people I’ve seen use that word really meant “voilà.”  As in, the interjection you might say when presenting something.  It’s used something like “tada!”  (Obtw, I would be willing to accept “voilà” without the accent, since accents can sometimes be a pain to include when you’re typing.)

Why does “walla” bother me so much?  I’m not entirely sure.  Maybe it has to do with the fact that it’s not even pronounced “walla.”  Do you see that V in front of voilà?  It’s not a silent V.  It’s not even a weird V that you pronounce like a W.  It’s pronounced like a V.  Merriam-Webster says that it’s pronounced like \vwä-ˈlä\.  I’m sure that’s very clear to you now.

Maybe you’re arguing that since the word is French in origin and the French do all kinds of weird and funny things to their spelling but still pronounce things the same way, spelling “voilà” as “walla” shouldn’t matter.  And I say to you pbblblblt (this is my spelling approximation of blowing a raspberry)!  I think we should respect other cultures and their weird spelling rules and spell words like they meant those words to be spelled.  And I mean it especially for our own English words.

LEARN TO SPELL.  IT’S NOT REALLY THAT DIFFICULT.  AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, YOU MIGHT AS WELL READ MORE.  AND DO YOUR MATH HOMEWORK.  DID YOU KNOW THAT HAVING A PAGE FULL OF CALCULATIONS CAN BE VERY SATISFYING TO LOOK AT AND RELAXING TO PRODUCE?  JUST…MAKE YOUR EDUCATION COUNT FOR SOMETHING, OK?