Driving home from work Friday, I get to Rt 55. I need to make a left onto 55 to head south to my little suburb. Where the road I'm on meets it, 55 is on a hill and a curve; and the road I'm on meets 55 at an angle and a hill of its own, so it can be a tough merge - you gotta creep up pretty close to the northbound lane to get a good view of the traffic. So, I do. There are two cars in back of me waiting for their turn - they creep up anxiously.<\/p>\n
Everyone else in town is already on 55 south making the same commute I do, the line of cars is going less than 20 mph, and there's a stop light about a half-mile south of me causing backups. So I need to wait for a hole to open up. I see a hole coming my way, maybe 200 yards off. Traffic on 55 N is light (and so, moving much faster than 55 S), but it's looking like it'll be all clear when that hole gets to me. So, I wait. <\/p>\n
I've been at the intersection maybe 15 seconds total, when I hear tires squealing, and out of the corner of my right eye I see that the guy in back of me has had enough of my goofing around and is going to make a break for it. He's gonna try to get into this 3\/4 car-length hole that's passing us on 55 S. Picture it: he's making a left turn onto a two lane road by going around me on my right, uphill, at an angle to the road. He has essentially no view of the traffic situation. So I see him, and for a half of a second, two thoughts occupy my brain simultaneously: \"Wow, what an asshole!\" and \"But, what about the car<\/i> ... ?\"<\/p>\n
Smash. He gets his nose into the road and immediately gets it smacked by a car zipping up 55 N. He stops dead, his front end sprayed all over the road. The car that was going north continues basically north, but now with a little hint of west<\/i>. It bounces off two cars in the line crawling down 55 S, where it trades in its western momentum for some eastern<\/i> momentum and ends up in the ditch on the right side. The beautiful paintjob hopelessly marred.<\/i><\/p>\n
The dumb guy gets out of his car, gives me a look like \"whew, that was close\", and runs down the road to see if anyone is hurt. I consider ranting at him for being such an asshole driver, when I realize he's responsible for a four car accident - he's gonna get some sharp words from the people whose cars he wrecked, so I hold back my righteous anger and call 911 instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Driving home from work Friday, I get to Rt 55. I need to make a left onto 55 to head south to my little suburb. Where the road I'm on meets it, 55 is on a hill and a curve; and the road I'm on meets 55 at an angle and a hill of its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}