Still working along on the older machine. And getting some progress.
It’s snowing. I made a run after some cat food, and a guy at the grocery just blithely flings his car door wide just as I pull into the next space. Fortunately I have good reaction time, and didn’t take his door off.
Ran into the guy in the supermarket in every single aisle. He’s dithering around, an obstacle in fairly narrow aisles. I didn’t say a word about the near miss–not even a cross look. Our paths cross and recross.
I check out. We both go out to our cars. Same time. We get in. I delay, since he’s to my right, thinking I’ll let him go out first.
He delays. I finally—gingerly and suspiciously—back out and get the heck away from him. I trust he got out ok.
Snowy days in Spokane. I swear people go on mental holiday when the snow flies, especially when it’s the first of a new stretch of snowy weather and people are out like squirrels stocking up on nuts for the new cold spell.
I wish the fellow luck.
What you ran into there is what I refer to as one of the Oblivious. They are everywhere; they don’t see you or indeed, anything much beyond their own needs. Not out of hostility or malice; they’re just locked in their own little world and are absolutely stunned when they accidentally bump into you because they really didn’t see you there. Good thing you were alert 🙂
Sometimes I wonder if people understand what the function of the various controls on their cars are designed to do. Such as that little stalk on the left side of the steering column, you pull it down before you make your left turn, and you push it up before you make a right turn. You don’t sit at a stop light and then decide to put it on when the light turns green. There are mirrors on the car that are designed to give you a view of what’s behind you, especially if that vehicle behind you has a light bar with red and/or blue lights that are flashing. Duh!
One of my pet peeves in a parking lot, especially something like Walmart, is the people who cut across the parking places to get to the exit, sometimes driving out from behind another vehicle right in front of me. They look at me as if to say, “Why, what are you doing in the lane?” or, when you start to pull into a parking place and the fool on the other side decides to drive right on through right where you’re intending to park. And do you HAVE to back your full-sized pickup truck into the parking place, of course it only takes you two or three tries to get it “just right”, and then the front end sticks out into the traffic lane….but hey, you got a primo parking place, bucko!
People in their cars are as Silverglass said, wrapped in their own little shells and oblivious to what’s going on around them. In the Navy, we call it “situational awareness”, and you have to know what’s going on around you all the time. It’s that unexpected event that can be fatal, not just in warfare, but in everyday driving.
Glad you were able to stop in time. Did he even bother to go “oops!”, or did he just ignore the fact that he was an idiot? I had one incident once where I was waiting on a parking space, had my signal on to indicate that I was going to park there, and no sooner did the departing car clear, then a woman in a Buick decided that she wanted my space. I did say something to her, and of course, her response was, “So what, you think you’re a big man or something?” I wanted to say that if she had been a man, she wouldn’t have said that…….I guess she felt she was entitled to be selfish or something…..
Oh, I hear you so well on that, and the people who drive the wrong way down one-way aisles.
And the pickup, if not backed in, will either be taking up at least two spaces (if they can) or three feet of aisle.
It makes me want to either run dotted-line tape up and over and down the truck where it sticks out, or get a cutting laser and cut it almost in half at the same location, especially when they’ve put in into a space clearly labeled ‘COMPACT’.
joekc6nlx, it’s not just people in cars. I have come across so many people like this in person! I can be standing right behind someone waiting to check out at a store, and when they finish their transaction they take a huge step backward, preparatory to leaving, clearly not remotely aware that I’m standing there. Same thing sometimes just walking down the sidewalk. I don’t think I’m THAT quiet.
OTOH I’ve been known to “go invisible.” It seems to be a Thing with me. I can be sitting in a room, have someone pass by, look inside and then tell someone else that they can’t find me anywhere. Very useful at times but annoying when it causes someone to bump into me 🙁
One of the joys of driving a ‘small’ suv is taking a ‘compact’ car space, because we fit nicely. Up in the the Pacific NW, pickup trucks, monster pickups with big tires, are actually not all a vanity thing—if you live in the hills, that’s possibly going to serve you better than a sedan, come deep snowfall. But in town, parking in the downtown garage, that’s a pita for a lot of reasons. One thing you can say, most of them do park ‘straight’ and their presence means the slots don’t tend to be super-small—but then you have the ones that really shouldn’t have Big Vehicles, and I particularly lump in the drivers of Yukons and Sequoias…many of whom park askew, or make a whole line of people wait while they work their way into a slot and adjust like a wasp packing its prey into a nest.
My absolute unfavorites are those crazies who wait at a stopsign on a cross street UNTIL there’s traffic on the main street and THEN decide to go. They start young, with bicycles. And work up to Yukons. In my family we call them ‘darting dinkies’ though the Yukons aren’t so dinky. I have always driven in the theory that anyone waiting through perfectly good chances to cross at at a cross street is going to arbitrarily dart across at any moment…I eye them with great suspicion.
An argument for forward mounted lasers……
My local grocery store parking lot, and the neighborhood in general, are completely prone to that.
I live in a very “settled” and mostly older neighborhood which was on the edge of the city back in the 1950’s, when subdivisions were first coming in. Many of the people in this area are older, seniors. But now there are younger folks, well, my age and younger, moving in as the original owners age out. Also, this area is right between an older, historic (and therefore pricey) part of town and an older, ah, “ethnically and historically segregrated” (and very poor) part of town. So my neighborhood (the area of subdivisions and businesses) is extremely diverse in nearly every demographic (economic, education, gender, race, etc.) that you could think of, though not as diverse on age range.
Whatever the reasons, though, there are a great many people around here who are among those Oblivious of whom Silverglass spoke. As in, one had better watch where one’s going, because the people around one, drivers or cyclists or (foolhardy) pedestrians, are most certainly *not* watching what’s around them.
This is very, very evident in the parking lot for my local grocery store. The lot has a very narrow side parking lot besides the main one. This side lot was made even narrower, nearly untenable, when the street was widened a few years ago, taking up space from the businesses on either side of the street (a major street).
It is…very dicey…parking or walking in that narrow side lot. It is very dicey getting in and out of the lot to and from the street. This is due both to the bad configuration of the side lot and how its entrances abutt the main lot, as much as to the Oblivious factor, and it is made worse by the number of drivers who either didn’t get good driver training or who are now older with poor reaction time, sight, or hearing, often all three.
I should add that I’m vision-impaired (legally blind) and will be 49 in less than a month and a half. So I don’t (can’t) drive. But as a measure of the problem… there are times I know I could drive better than the people in the parking lot or on the street. And this is borne out in the grocery store, navigating with a shopping cart. Until the store recently decided to go for “mood lighting” to save money/energy, I was generally better than others with their carts. The use of low-output “mood lighting,” however, has made it…well, a separate issue, I have been tempted to get a hiker’s / miner’s headlamp for a cap / hardhat, and wear that in, without comment, to do my shopping. (Other chains have been doing that too, lately. It *really* bothers me and I have a big problem now with it.)
So…sympathy on the hazards of dealing with the Oblivious. That is really not a good survival strategy on their part. Stay awake, people! :-/
There was a running joke in my family about needing a big scoop on the front end of the car or van, like a bulldozer. Scoop up the offending driver ahead and deposit same elsewhere, out of the way.
But yeah, the jumping ability of Speed Racer’s Mach 5 would do it too.
Or those handy forward-mounted lasers. There are times….
I used to seriously wonder whether people in our area had learned what to do with that “high-priced driving accessory known as a turn-signal.” I seriously believe that the lack of use is because people weren’t trained to use them properly. The driving code in most states says that you have to signal a lane change, that includes when you are planning on getting into a lane that only allows one to go in one direction such as a left turn lane. In the state I learned to drive, you had to signal to get into the left turn lane and then signal that you really were going to make the required lane turn. So few people signal lane-changes that when we moved to Arizona I paid particular attention to the rules for lane changes and turning. There was no change in the laws between east coast and Arizona.
Arizona does have some unique laws about using the lanes in the median between lanes. The lanes are only for use as a turn lane, not to merge into traffic. For example the median lane can be used to make left turns into parking lots or side streets, but can’t be used as a merge lane when coming out of a parking lot onto a thoroughfare looking for a gap in traffic to merge into. I guess that law is reversed in Phoenix because I’ve never seen a place with more people driving down that median lane (and getting mad at people stopped blocking them to make a left turn into a parking lot).
I used to think the manufacturers sent all the cars with headlight dimmers that didn’t work to Oregon. But since, immigrants seem to have brought more out-of-state cars in. More seem to have functional dimmers because they’re driving with “low beams”.
I’d be blaming Arizona’s lax immigration laws. 😉 Look at how many people from other states live there, even if only during winter months. So, the people from Ohio who have a winter home in Glendale or Scottsdale, and who don’t use their $%^$!@^&* signals in Ohio, just transfer that bad habit to Arizona.
I’m now officially “wheel-less” for at least the next two days. Car’s in the shop and depending on how much underlying damage they find to the bumper and frame, it could be there longer. Hated to have to spend that $500 that I’ve been trying to save. You know, cutting back on what I buy, how much I buy, etc. (The cats DO NOT go without the same food I usually buy them.)
I scheduled this appointment for a day when I have little to do outside of going to the after-school tutoring program, and if push comes to shove, I can walk or ride a bicycle over there in a few minutes. I’ve already got the essentials that I might need, such as milk, bread, etc., so I don’t need to go out and get anything else.
Found my share of “parking lot idiots” again, the ones who blithely drive across the lots as though there wouldn’t be anyone in the “aisles” between parking places. Too bad it’s private property, because if they dart out and you can’t stop in time, it’s now between the insurance companies. I got slammed from behind one time while on a motorcycle in Norfolk, VA, the guy had been drinking, and for whatever reason, the cop didn’t cite him. I guess if I had said I’d been hurt, then he would have been in more trouble, but truthfully, I wasn’t hurt. Turns out the insurance information he gave was false, but nothing ever came of it. At that time in Norfolk, if you were a sailor, you already had at least one strike against you. (They used to have signs that read, “Dogs and sailors keep off the grass.”, and several of the local establishments would charge sailors an excessive cover charge to get in, whereas if you were a college kid, you got in for a couple of bucks.)
I got a call from the body shop, they’ve found more damage than was evident from first look. It seems that the bumper is bent, the radiator lower brace and the left headlight brace is also bent. Possibly some other damage, but right now, they’re looking at it being in the shop until at least Friday. They emailed me a picture of the car as it looked after they got the bumper off, except, it’s not my car. My car is beige, they sent me a picture of a blue car.
I got the car at 3:30PM EST this afternoon, Friday….yay! Instead of $900, it came to about $1,981, of which my share is $500. I wonder what this will do to my insurance premiums, as it’s the first claim I’ve made in over 20 years. Well, next payment is in March, I guess we’ll find out.