Traveling

*Note: this was written last Friday, but I did not get a chance to post it.

I got to take a road trip today at work. Thus far it has been going fairly well. Though our company is headquartered in Mechanicsburg, the top executives work out of an office in Allentown. Typically, the CFO and controller spend 2 days a week in Mechanicsburg, but on special occasions, they summon some people to make the trip to Allentown. Today my boss and I are in there for a meeting. We came up early to add to get some other work done and make sure we were here on time which has left me some free time. Surprisingly, I have accomplished a great deal of work in the hour and a half I have been sitting across a conference table from my boss. She is in the meeting at the moment and I am starting to run out of things to do.

Driving up here got me thinking about some of the driving experiences in my life. Have you ever been in a high pressure driving situation because of the people you are riding with or following? I have been in a few in my time. I got a little nervous the first time I drove with the associate pastor of our church in Lock Haven. I was just taking on a leadership role and didn’t want to show I was reckless in any way. Even the first time I was driving with my mother-in-law in the car added a little bit of pressure. I didn’t want her to think her baby married some out of control guy based on his driving. Today went pretty well, though the pressure did cross my mind. I am escorting about my boss who is an officer of our company. It would be terrible if I made some kind of goofy turn or slammed on my breaks deciding whether or not to make a yellow light and she calmly mentioned “how about I drive?” Luckily, nothing like that happened. You even have to consider the speed of driving. You want to make good time on a business trip, but excessively speeding is bad news, especially if you got pulled over. I kept it pretty close to 10 over, and my boss seemed comfortable. She was working on her laptop the whole time, so comfort was important.

The main reason I bring up travel is to share 2 quick and fairly funny things I have seen on the road in the last week. There are many times I just don’t understand what people are thinking when the drive, but these instances are so odd that they deserve to be mentioned.

Number 1: The Bad Advice Lady. Yesterday while driving back to work on my lunch break, I came to a 3 way intersection with a light. My road was the non-dominate road and I got to the intersection just as it turned red, so I knew I would be there for a while. There was a long line of cars to the right and to the left and teenage boy standing on the corner to my left waiting to cross. The cars on my right got to go first because they had a green turn arrow onto my road. The kid saw that cars were turning his way and waited at the corner. When the arrow went away, the right side stayed green for going straight and the left side got a green light. It was at this moment that the kid decided to walk. It was the absolute correct time for him to go because he was going parallel to the green light traffic. The first car in the line of cars to my left was an older woman driving her brown Buick. She started moving just after the light turned green and nearly hit the kid crossing the road. He was walking at the correct time, and pedestrians always have the right of way anyway. Not only did this woman come close to severely injuring an innocent kid, she felt that it necessary to tell him that he was in the wrong. Despite the long line of cars and dangers of the intersection. She stopped right in the middle of everything, cranked down her window, and gave the kid a piece of her mind. I did not have time to get my window down to hear what she had to say, by I venture to guess it was something about his incompetence, blaming it on rap music, and told him to go home to his mother. I felt bad for the kid who did nothing wrong, and was very tempted to role down my window and give the lady some advice, most important of which was to get out of the intersection before she caused a wreck.

The 2nd story is even more surprising. Liz and I were on our way home from the movies last weekend. There has been a silly amount of construction on all the roads around the theater. The main road to the theater is normally 4 lanes, but has been reduced to 2 lanes on one side for a while, then 2 lanes on the other side, and now back to 4 lanes. There was a line of cars in the left turn lane waiting at the light, and I went up the right side. I got to the light and was looking to go right on red. There was a single car coming down the intersecting road, so I waited for it. The driver put on a turning signal; I waited until they started making the turn to be safe, then started to make my turn. While making my turn, Liz and I noticed the other turning vehicle taking the turn much wider than expected, and going surprisingly slow. I can understand their mistake. They didn’t know it had been reopened to 4 lanes, and they were looking to turn into the slot as if it was still 2 lanes which put them facing oncoming traffic in “their right lane” which was actually our left turning lane. I understand the mistake and the slow driving due to confusion, but here is what I don’t understand, the car kept moving! There was no speeding up, slowing down, or turning off the projected path, just slow constant speed head first into a car that had been sitting at the red light for some time with headlights on in the evening and honking their horn! We were completely amazed at the spectacle we just saw. Using my deductive reasoning, I suggest this happened: the driver was confused and slowed down to the pace her car drove when not applying pressure to the break or accelerator. At the moment the driver realized they were in the wrong lane, they panicked and froze. Being froze, they made no effort to prevent what was about to happen, they just sat there in shock for a few seconds as their car ran head first into a parked car. I can think of no other reasonable solution, though it is entirely possible that the driver thought they were right and the cars waiting at the light were wrong. Liz and I didn’t stick around to listen to the conversation following the accident, but I imagine it was unpleasant.

Time to get back to work. Thanks for reading.