You Know You're Getting Older...

... when you get angry at the youngin's cutting traffic when you've been politely in line for 30 minutes and they've been waiting for less than five.

There is some serious traffic going on through the back roads between Springville and Provo. It's the route I take every day to BYU and back home. All summer long the traffic due to construction really hasn't been that bad. And then, they decided to merge lanes BEFORE the stoplight on the way home from work.

They've been doing this for about a week now. The first time I realized they were going to make the crazy decision to merge lanes before the four-way stop, I admit that I was halfway to the light before I saw the blinking arrows and turned into the line. Since that day I have made a concentrated effort to get into the one and only line of entry early.

But not everyone is so observant. Understandably, everyone wants to get home as soon as possible. Some are willing to wait in line, not using the turning lane to cut to the front of the line.  Ooh! But today...

Ergh! This is what happened today. I got in the back of the line early, and at first I was very charitable. "Oh, did you just realize that we are all in one line? Sure you can get in front of me." "Hello, kind SUV. I will make room for you here in the back of the line." But then as I inched towards the front... or didn't move at all and waited for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, on what was supposed to be a 5 minute drive, I started to get a little frustrated.

It started with the black sedan. I could hear them approaching from behind. Yelling. I looked around to see who would be making that sort of noise in calm traffic. A girl. She was smoking while driving. She was in the lane that was supposed to be used for turning. I moved slowly as the car in front of me moved, and then all of a sudden her left side was in front of mine! She probably had one foot of wiggle room total to put it there. And then... she swore at me. Called me a name. "Really?" I had to let her through, because she was already half way. She made a sharp U turn into the suicide lane next to me. "Glad she's not in line any more."

Another black car... (what is with owners of black cars?!) "Well, Hello Jetta! You think you can just creep right in here without even a wave?" It was a pretty quick move. But he realized too late that he chose to enter the part of the line that wasn't moving, because 100 cars had passed to cut in front. So what did Jetta do? He maneuvered to the middle of both the one entry lane and the turning lane, causing both lanes to pause. "Choose ye this day which lane you will drive in, Jetta!" It didn't choose until it could tell for sure that the cars cutting in the front were actually getting in line in an appropriate time frame.

I was pretty defiant at that point. "You're gettin' close to the front now, you PROBABLY should have realized that we're not just stopped for an accident. See the orange con-struc-tion cones?"

I'm really not normally the angry sort of driver. I think it just a process with age that I try to respect the order of the universe while the young or rebellious still try to break the rules. Probably the next phase of life is when I'm patient enough to handle it. To prove my point, I did let an older woman in the line at the front. And she did wave, maybe like it was her first time through this particular construction zone and she hadn't realized. "Just because I could tell you had a perm this week."

The only way I could possibly get over this frustration, of course, is to blog about it. But wouldn't you know, I forgot my camera at home. So instead, I took this picture of Angry old me on my mac.

All better.