Honk that horn, you bastard

Our Captain in Montreal once told me "You have to know something, Marianne, there are plenty of ASSHOLES on the roads around here."

People behind the wheels forget themselves from time to time. Actually quite often. They get sucked into the mission of getting from one place to another, operating the vehicle and maneuvering between thousands of other cars on the same mission - just different destinations.

After a few years of practice, the technical part of driving becomes automatic and one drift into driving-mode, a sort of hypnotic concentration, slightly distant to the surroundings but with continuous focus on the road. Or so one should hope.

In this condition, the self guards for a lot of people tend to be off duty.

I would never, ever even dream of yelling " move your ass, fuckhead!!" to a stranger who happen to cut me off at the lineup for the counter at the supermarket. No matter how cheeky or deliberate he is. In fact, I would never say those words to a strangers face, period. Not even when I'm drunk.

But I have to admit I'm one of those who loose my self guard when driving. Behind the wheel, I'm responsible for driving safely, not responsible for practicing good manners. Observed from a distance I probably balance on the borderline of Tourettes syndrome. But hey, I'm not the only one.

The thing is, when you happen to be in stable driving-mode, which is really where you should be when driving 70 miles per hour on a highway, you get startled when you realize that some people are not. People talk on the phone, read sms, eat, smoke, smoke and talk on the phone at the same time - and thereby cause dangerous situations or fail to let you in when you're entering the 95.

Thats when you feel the blood boiling for a moment and words you didn't think you had in your vocabulary get aired out. Nobody out there can hear what you're really saying. But then cars are fitted with horns, and honking is international, it translates all swearwords in all languages into one generic anger tone. As far as I'm told, it is there for safety purpose, but for a lot of drivers it serves as a great impulsive anger outlet button.

Recently I had someone honking at me for about 10 seconds. Imagine what he wanted to put across ... Don't remember what I did, probably failed to go on a green light or something because I turned around to talk to my son in the back seat. That's ok, I understand. I probably could have done the same.

Not that I didn't raise a fist at him. Can't remember wether a finger was up or not, but it's not important. The impulsive road anger disappears just as fast as it appears, with no regrets.

The reason why you react in the first place is because you are very alert. A lot of accidents happen, but a lot of accidents are avoided too thanks to horrendous impulsive reaction behavior.

The Captain is right. There are a lot of assholes on the roads. And we're all just people in cars.