I have a one-hour commute every morning. My wife works with me, so we usually commute together. About three years ago, I had about a four-month period where my wife was at home after the birth of our daughter. I hate to say this, but somehow my wife slows me down when I start my commute. If I'm on my own, I can get out of the house by 6:05 with no extra effort. Somehow she adds on about 20 minutes. That 20 minutes makes an extreme difference because the highway gets crowded about then. So for about four months, I was able to avoid the crazier part of the commute.
One morning I got out extremely early. I hit the road at about 5:50. The highway was almost deserted. I was tooling along at a respectable 65–70 mph. There is no one in sight ahead of me and just one car way off in the distance behind me. Next thing I know, the car behind me decides that he has to pass me. That's fine. I'm a fairly easy-going guy. For some reason he decides that he has to make a big show of it, as if I'd been slowing him down. He cuts into the right lane, barely missing my bumper and then does the same coming around in front of me. I'd say he had maybe two or three feet of clearance. Why he did this, I cannot fathom except some people are just complete idiots. I see them all the time on the commute, including people who pass off the road, people who play chicken with big rigs, even people who tailgate CHP.
Still, this kind of rankled. Mr. 1995 Ford Probe With Authentic Pre-Crumpled Door had decided to be about as rude as you can be. With a completely deserted highway and no real reason why he couldn't have passed me even a hundred yards earlier and then re-merged a hundred yards later (even three hundred!) had to show how cool he was. How cavalier he could be with my life, just so that he could show me that driving a hair above the speed limit is rude when he wanted an unobstructed race at 85mph.
So… I guess I can go 85. Heck, why not 90! There is literally NO ONE ELSE OUT HERE. I get to about five car lengths behind him. He rolls down his window and flips me off. Or at least… I think he's flipping me off. It is, after all, still before dark. The sun isn't even thinking about coming up yet. Just to be sure, I turn on my brights. Sure enough, he is holding his middle finger out there. Well, that's fine. Again, there's no one out there, and since he's so enamoured of sign language and so eloquent, I don't want to miss a thing. I keep my brights on for the next ten miles, only turning them off when cars are (rarely) coming in the opposite direction.
As I’m within range of my exit, I speed up until I'm right next to him. Just to show him that I bear him no ill will, I flash him my biggest, sunniest smile, making sure to show him all of my teeth. Joe (I assume that's his name, since he has it tattooed on his neck) again shows me his middle finger. Then he drops down in speed to get behind me. His ’95 Ford Probe’s “brights” come on. At least I think they're brights. They're scarcely brighter than his regular lights, so I'm not sure if they deserve the name.
Alas, Joe and I parted ways there. He went off to… Buy meth I guess? I went off to my job. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Don't know how, don't know when… But until then, Joe, if you ever read this (assuming you can read) always remember that your lights are about three feet up there. Your brights are roughly level with my bumper. The brights of my truck are level with your window. I'm going to win every time.
Also, thanks to the earlier commute and the extra speed, I got to work early enough to check my mailbox where I found a nice little overtime check. I hope Joe got one as well… but I doubt it. If so, he should buy a new tires. It looked like he was riding on watermelons.