Have I mentioned I hate being sick? I believe I may have once or twice. Don't expect this course of events to change, by the way. I will get sick, and I will tell you about it.
{later that day...}
So I'm driving home this afternoon, and I'm in a bit of a rush. My wife had told me that she'd had a hard day with our son, and she was keen for me to get home. I stopped by the Games Wizards (my game/anime shop of choice) to pick up some DVDs, and was now on my way home. Between the shop and my home, there is a reasonably long stretch of road that is fairly straight, and has an 80Km/hr speed limit. My intent, was to travel along this stretch at perhaps a velocity slightly above that limit, as wanted to get home as soon as possible. That intention was foiled when I got caught behind a car travelling at 20Km/hr under the perscribed speed limit. The irony of this, is that the car was....
... A RED PORSCHE CONVERTABLE.
Now, hopefully you can see why this would be frustrating. I'm driving a 96 model Toyota Corolla (which is a great car, mind you) and I'm caught behind a car worth many times as much as mine is. A car which is expensive BECAUSE IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE FAST, DAMMIT!! The driver looks to be in his mid-thirties to early forties, and yet is driving slower then the average geriatric.
Now, let me not advocate speeding - because this isn't what this is about. It's about people driving at, or at least close to, the speed limit. I would have been fine if he'd been doing 80km/h, but it seems to me that the logical conclusion one should draw from this whole incident is that this guy and me should swap cars. I mean - he wants to go slow: my car will do that just fine. I want to go fast: his car is built to go fast. We should swap. It should be compulsorary for him. His car's image implies speed - speed which he doesn't want to use. So he should replace it with a car that doesn't imply speed; that being mine. After all, he was holding me up: it's only fair.
Needless to say, that I failed to mention this to him when I pulled up beside him at the lights. I hear* those things have GPS-enabled panic buttons in them these days that instantly send SWAT-like teams to your location to beat up anyone in your vacinity. (*Note: I didn't actually hear that - it's just a convenient falsehood to support my cowardice.)
The moral of this story is, that if you're going to spend a mint on a car that sells itself as being fast, at least drive at a speed that doesn't make you look like you're out to buy some Depends undergarments. I'm happy to sit behind someone driving at a cautious 5-10km/hr under the limit, but any more then that is just arrogent - you're holding other people up because you feel that they should conform to your desired slowness.
Shame on you, Mr. Porsche driver. No soup for you!
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2 comments:
I totally understand Justin. Things like this happen to me all the time - ok, so I don't usually get stuck behind a porsche, but I regularly get stuck behing people doing up to 40 km under the speed limit! Especially on that road in Yarramundi that goes up the mountain.... It's a 100km speed zone, yet people (driving cars that are clearly able to do this speed) are driving on it at say 50km - 60km. I like to call them "hats" or "Sunday Drivers", because in my experience, lots of people drive slow on Sundays (they are usually older people who only take their car out for a drive once a week), and lots of those people also wear hats. Except these days they seem to drive slow on other days as well, not just sundays. Now I wouldn't mind if they were doing a bit under the speed limit, like you said, but 40km under? That's just annoying. It's like they've missed the giant signs along the road that say "100km". And then when they get to the 80km zone on the road, they suddenly realise the speed limit and they speed up to 80km so you can't overtake them! grrrrrrrr....
Yep, I'm totally there with the sunday driver comment. It's worrying to think that while they are driving slowly, they are doing so out of lack of awareness which indicates they might be more dangerous on the road (not to mention antagonising other drivers).
And it's also frustrating when such drivers have really expensive cars, yet are not using the ability of those cars to avoid obstruction to other drivers. Ok, my specific gripe here is that I like to get a run-up at the start of a steep, long uphill. Then you get some old guy in a commodore statesman going really slowly, and when they hit the uphill bit they accelerate and power on up; meanwhile, my little engine would have been fine if it had just been able to get some speed up beforehand.
On a tangent, this leads to my paradoxical driving tip: generally it's better to hang back from such drivers to give yourself a run up so that you can overtake them just at the point when the overtaking lane starts 200m up the hill (this really applies to wimpy cars that choose to go slow into a hill)
Ok my ranting is done here. Except to say that if I had a powerful car I would not inconvenience other drivers by going slowly in front of them...
(hooray for stereotypes!)
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