Saturday 15 November 2008

There she is!

You know that one slow driver that always magically happens to get stuck in front of you on roads where it's impossible to overtake? It's an every-morning tradition to guess which kind of a car it will be this time (usually a lorry, but it could also be a perfectly good BMW that just doesn't seem to be able to accelerate). I drive 40km to work each morning and I know the road by heart, most of it is either too narrow or too heavily trafficked to allow any overtaking at all. So I need to resort to all kinds of shortcuts, parallel roads, village and fieldside roads to avoid The Slow Car. Up to now I had always thought of the Slow Car as a car rather than a person, but now I finally met the Slow Person, too!

One gloomy rainy morning, waiting for the lift, I found next to me a 50-ish lady, well dressed, wearing a heavy mask of make-up and an expression that was obviously too naive for her age. She decided to pick up some conversation:
S: "Such a horrible morning, isn't it?"
m: "Mhm."
S: "Yes, and the traffic is terrible!"
m: "Mhm." (Indeed it was, I had suffered for 15 minutes behind a car that couldn't read the road signs and went along at the speed of good 40km/h until I couldn't take it any more and blew the horn to make the car wake up or pull over. No reaction.)
S: "And the people get so vexing too on days like this, they keep making such rude gestures at you when you're not fast enough! Ah, there is no patience in the world!"
m: "Mhm..."

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