Fun Friday Nights

John

Last week I had the unenviable pleasure of attending traffic school due to the fact that I like to speed. It turns out that 15 over is grounds for a speeding ticket. Who knew?
Anyway, I left work at 5:30 to get to the festive gathering of vehicular malcontents that started at 6:15.
On my invitation was the sentence,"Late arrivals will not be admitted," so I figured that I best get at it and get there about 15 minutes early. This way I would have been able to eat my pizza, and calm down from the drive. Apparently all other drivers were informed of my plans and were ordered to stall me any way possible. It was so bad that I actually considered driving on the side walk, which would allow me to cut through a parking lot on the corner and miss the light. I didn't, but I did run two red lights, and speed to beat all hell when I had the chance, and arrived at 10 after 6. Not enough time to eat, and definitely not enough time to calm down.
Having no where to sit but up front, I figured I'd sit right in front of the instructor so at least I wouldn't fall asleep during my re-education. Besides, I wouldn't have anyone knocking elbows during the class. At least so I thought.
When the traffic school marm came in five minutes late, she told everyone to fill up the first four rows and leave the back row empty. She then said," Leave the door open. We always have some people showing up late."
"What the fuck?" I told the lady sitting next to me that if she heard anything that it was my tummy rumbling.
After another twenty minutes of getting everyone signed in, the lady started handing out some papers that had lists and descriptions of different driving characteristics. The object of these was to have you evaluate your driving and come to the conclusion that you're a lousy driver and decide to change your ways. I looked on them as some sort of shopping list, and began looking through trying to find out how many more bad habits I needed in order to collect the whole set.
It turns out that I pretty much have all the traits needed to open a "Do as I say, not as I do" driving school.
In class, we went over speeding, changing lanes, reaction times, alcohol, etc. When we got to the portion on road rage, the marm was looking over the class, saying that she could pick out the ragers. I was wearing a Shit Eating Grin when she look at me and said,"nah," and went on to someone others. When asked what made them rage, answers were the normal things that irk us all- people going slow in fast areas and vice-versa, cutting people off, etc. Marm made it all around the room, and then asked if anyone else raged and what set them off. I chuckled, raised my hand. When calling on me, marm looked oddly at me. I guess the collared shirt and sweater made me look more innocent.
"Pedestrians," I said. "I work downtown and they're all over. They cross in the middle of the street trying to hold their pants up 'cause they're not wearing belts. They cross against the lights and slow down in front of you when you're trying to go."
"What do you do when that happens?" she asked in an authoritative "I've seen it all" air.
"I honk, yell out the window, pull right up to them, and oh, last week I got one with the mirror"
Buckwheat has nothing on this lady's expression. Some people in the class laughed, some gasped, on one guy in the back loudly exclaimed, "oh shit!"
"That person could have gotten your license plate number!"
"Nah, he was too busy spinning around in the street. I was barely going at the time."

She warned me to be careful and that I'm 10 times more likely to get sued today than I would have been 10 years ago.
"Shit," I thought,"I didn't know I could have gotten away with that ten years ago."

Traffic purgatory lasted four hours last Friday, and when everyone got out at ten, they all rushed for the exit from the parking lot.
I yelled at someone in the parking lot as I was leaving traffic school. Life is good.