Saturday, February 25, 2006

Sarah vs The Whip Arounders

One of my pet peeves is how people drive on Taylor. For the most part Taylor had one lane for each direction, and each lane is neighbour to a parking lane. For some reason on this street and this street alone people feel it is ok to drive in that parking lane. I mean sure, if you are making a right, then you pull in there as the start of your turn, but I am talking about people who do the 'Whip Around'. The Whip Around is when the car in the lead is not moving fast enough for the car behind, so the follower swerves into the parking lane and accelerates, passing the lead car on the right and then pulls back into the driving lane. For the most part this is merely a show of incredible impatience, but sometimes it is a very bad idea. I was actually explaining the whip around to Eric one day and he said he didn't really see what was so wrong. At the time we were stopped behind a vehicle on Taylor and the car behind us whipped around to pass both us and the lead vehicle. The car had to quickly slam on it's brakes though because the reason the lead vehicle had stopped in the first place was because it was a crosswalk, and a pedestrian was crossing. The Whip Around was very close to really hurting someone that day.

Well today I was waiting to make a left turn. Remember, there is only one lane on this road for each direction - so when the car opposite me was also making a left turn it should mean it is all clear for me to go, however the nextmost approaching car didn't wait. They did the whip around. Of course this means I have to slam on the brakes because not only has this car suddenly swerved into a collision course with me, but they haven't braked at all and are still moving at 50 kph. I said to my mom "God I hate when people whip around. " The next vehicle was a van and while I waited for it to whip around as well I added, "They should all get the finger." and then I gave the driver of the van a good view of mine as I kept on the lookout for more whip arounders.

A minute after I made my turn my phone rang. I answered it and I heard a voice say "Sarah"? It was Patrick. I said "Yes?" and I waited to see what he wanted and it was darn lucky I was pulled over at the time because the next thing I heard made me laugh so hard I probably would have swerved into oncoming traffic. He said: "Did you just give me the finger?!?!"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

a healthy dose of finger can make anyones day

Sarah J M said...

When someone adds a comment, the comment gets email to me, but since it is just the comment it is completely without context.

Perhaps I am just a pervert or something, but just re-read that comment without thinking of article it is attached to and see just what kind of context your brain conjures up for it.