Cartesy
Gassing up at my local Mobil station this morning, I noticed an ad above the pump that made me laugh. It was an ad for a MINI Cooper, a car I admire greatly, but haven't been able to convince Mrs. Boston Crazy Driving of its practicality. ("How are you going to put a baby seat in there?" To which I blithely respond, "You need a baby before the baby seat.")MINI has a new campaign called "Word of the Day," in which they define some kind of made up words that relates to driving. The one of the Web site when I went to find an example to link to was Roverdriving: the act of driving with a dog on you lap. Cute. The one on the ad at the gas station was Cartesy: When you let someone merge into your lane. I'd link, but the site is heavy on the Flash applications, and it makes visitors download the Word of the Day.
Anyway, I have benefited from cartesy before, and I have been "carteous," but I'm not the type to stop a line of traffic behind me to let someone go. That is discarteous to the people behind me who all have the right of way to the lane we are in.
That's not to say I won't let someone in or cut across. I'm not an ogre. I just don't believe in going from 40 to 0 to let someone out of a side street or make a left across my lane. I can't count how many times someone almost got my grill in his or her trunk because I didn't expect traffic to come to a complete stop to let someone out from a side street. It's just illogical to me. There's a driver with only one car behind him, and he stops to let someone turn left when the two cars could pass and the person could make the turn.
The worst example of this was on Route 1A North in Dedham. This was a few years ago, and the economical Ford Focus I was driving at the time almost became a Ford No-cus. There's a brief stretch of 1A, also Washington Street, where it is two lanes in each direction. A van heading SOUTH puts on his left turn signal and stops. Then the driver in front of me IN THE RIGHT NORTHBOUND LANE stops to let the van turn. Ours were the only three vehicles on the road at that moment. Then, because I had the nerve to beep at the driver for nearly causing an accident, the person got upset at me and followed me while flashing the brights and beeping the horns.
Let's think about this for a minute. You're bonehead maneuver almost got you into a serious accident, which would have been my fault by insurance rules, and you have the cajones to get mad at me? Wow. That is a big pair. |
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