Warning: Bimbos In Mirror Are Closer Than I'd Prefer

Today was the day that I'd planned to blog all about my new turntable and how awesome it is. This would have formed a sort of "Sprawl Trilogy" with the previous two blog entries of the week so far, which were also about consumer products. Luckily for all of you, however, this deep dive into getting and spending has been temporarily derailed by some gum-chewing woman in a Solara.

The circumstances of my current short-term employment contract require that I drive downtown every day in order to remotely administer a couple hundred systems that are located in a data center near my house. I appear to be the only person in the department who thinks this is completely idiotic. Every day I drive thirty-four miles for no reason whatsoever. Over the course of a year --- not that I'll be in this job a year --- I will drive 8,840 miles, burning about 341 gallons of gasoline. I spend a lot of my time in this office "dialed in" to conference calls that are happening elsewhere.

Not only does this commute cost me about five thousand dollars a year in vehicle-related expenses, it also eats fifty minutes of my life each way. Nearly 450 hours, or nineteen days straight. Put it this way: When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I'm a writer. I rarely spend a full two hours of my day writing. So it would be more accurate to say "I'm a guy who drives downtown every day. That's what I do." When I'm feeling down about this, I remind myself that until August of this year I'd only spent five days in an office.

So there I was, driving to work this morning. I was listening to Johnny Hartman's mis-named For Trane and paying only mild attention to the road ahead. That did not stop me from noticing that traffic was coming to a dead stop ahead of me. Normally in Ohio this is because something that is completely fascinating to hicks is happening, like a car in the ditch or the issuance of a speeding citation on the shoulder or the sudden appearance of light rain.

Regardless of the reason, it was time to stop my car, which I did, having plenty of time and space in which to do so. Then I did something that became a habit of mine when I started riding a Kawasaki Ninja 600R back in '94: I looked behind me to see how the person behind me was dealing with this sudden stop. Doing that saved my life (or at least my ass) probably five times in just 25,000 or so total motorcycling miles. It's a habit that has stood me in good stead as a club racer; when braking in traffic you "iguana eye" the mirror and the windshield, looking for a chance to pass while simultaneously defending against a move from a car behind you. It's a good habit, I think.

Behind me was a Camry Solara. Young woman with sunglasses. Over the course of about a second and a half I thought:

Not that cute. Chewing gum. Not paying attention. Finally starting to slow down. But not fast enough. Oh no --- her grille and bumper have crash damage. She's a serial ass-rammer. Time to move.

Which I did, popping the Accord's clutch and slipping out onto the shoulder about half a second before she came to a stop with her front bumper right where my driver's seat had been. She started honking and screaming. It took me a moment to register the presence of a monstrous new 4Runner next to her on the shoulder, abuot five feet behind me, with an Indian or Pakistani man clutching the wheel and shivering. She was screaming at him.

All at once the situation became clear. She'd spaced out on the traffic ahead. I never heard her tires squeal which meant that, like most people, she'd underbraked her way into the space which I'd been occupying. The Indian guy in the 4Runner had spaced even harder and had swerved to avoid hitting her.

A brief note on that: If you can swerve to a stop behind someone, Keith Code's Dollar Theory Of Tire Traction says you had the ability to just stop behind that person in less space without the swerve. Both of these people had vastly underbraked. The girl in the Solara had clearly done it before --- thus the crash damage --- but it was also possible, given the age and condition of the vehicle, that her brakes simply hadn't shown up for work. The guy in the 4Runner had no such excuse. They were both idiots, but he was the bigger idiot.

Normally this sort of thing makes me angry but this time I couldn't help but smile. Had I not moved my car, we'd have had at least a three-car crash, with the poor gum-chewing woman being Eiffel Towered by an Accord and a 4Runner. There's no way my car would have been totaled, so I'd have had the annoyance of riding herd on a body shop for a couple month while I drove a worn-out Corolla rental. From the un-repaired damage on her grille and bumper I'm guessing Solara Girl was without collision coverage, meaning she'd have been out of luck for wheels. And the poor guy in the 4Runner would have his brand-new truck ruined.

Now when I go out to my car this afternoon to drive home, I'm sure that I'll find out that one of my tires is flat from hitting debris on the shoulder or something like that. No good deed goes unpunished. That's okay. Sometimes you make an accommodation to help someone else out and it winds up costing you. When enough people are willing to do that, however, you have more than just individuals making decisions; you have what was once considered to be a society.