So all day yesterday, I sat in my window-view cube and watched the rain change over to snow. It was pretty and it wasn't sticky, so I wasn't too worried about my drive home. And I was right! The roads were wet but not that slick, there was precisely 0" accumulation and nothing was frozen. I thought to myself, "Sweet! Take it easy, go maybe 5 under, and watch my braking, and I should be home in no time. Easy peasy, livin' greasy."
And then I got stuck behind a little brown sedan with an Amway sticker, driven by Stan McNormalguy.
I came up behind him at a red light, and when it turned green, hand to God it took at least fifteen seconds for him to reach 25 mph. Which, it turned out, was his optimal (read: OHGODOHGODOHGODI'MGOINGTOSPINOUTANDDIE) cruising speed. This was on 86th Street. I have never in my life wanted so badly to ram someone off the road. I turned off first chance I got and didn't look back, not so much for my sake as for his. I was seriously flirting with full-on road rage (I'm not proud of that -- I'm normally a pretty mellow driver). In retrospect, I should have checked his license plate -- if it said "Alabama" or some such, that would have pretty well squared everything. But still: 25 in a 40, when the snow's not even sticking? Gimme a break. I hope the rest of the winter isn't like this.
3 comments:
Look on the bright side of things: At least the snow didn't stick here. I saw WTHR's footage from Muncie this morning, where their ditches were liberally garnished with automobiles.
(WV: "umish". A religious sect based on indecision and hesitation.)
Heh heh, Muncie. The line between "Not as bad as expected" and "holy crap good thing I stocked up on tea candles and toilet paper" runs right through Anderson. I noticed this driving back to Ball State the year that big ice storm hit over Christmas break.
This is a uniquely Hoosier phenomena I like to refer to as "Acid snow". It's not acid like acid rain, it's acid like LSD, and when it touches the hair of Hoosiers, it melts it's way in and causes the driving centers of the brain to hallucinate, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. This happens until about the fourth big snow, when several of the worst of them regain their composure. Usually, though, they've alloyed thirty thousand other people within an inch of sanity before then.
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