Going's On

So we have been outed. As anyone who reads either This Girl I Used To Know or Jerk OF All Trades now knows, This Girl is the wonderous and ubiquitous Wifey to Yours Truly.

As it turns out, that is almost all I have to say this morning. I had the second night of fitful sleep in a row last night, due to a rather disturbing incident which had almost nothing to do with me.

As no doubt you know, I drive a Miata.

It's that big.

So yesterday I was on the way back from running some errands, taking the not-quite-long-way home, when I was approached from the rear by a big, ugly dump truck.

There's a lot of construction going on in our area, what with the I-485 outerbelt construction, house farms, shopping centers and so forth getting built, so I'm pretty much used to dump trucks, and I give them a wide berth, for the following three reasons:

• They are too big for the brakes they have to stop them.
• They are unstable when empty and unweidly when full.
• Dump truck drivers are stoooooooooooooopid.

That last one is an uncontrovertable fact. Think about it: Would you drive a dump truck? See? The sole exception to this rule (in our area) is the Blue Max drivers, who must get paid alot (and trained alot), and who are courteous and skillful drivers. I wave to them.

This was not a Blue Max truck. Like I say, I am used to dump trucks in our area, but this one caught my eye. First off, the grill was made of a sub-standard material, and was about 75% missing. This is never a good sign. A dump truck is a big, heavy, expensive piece of machinery, and any sign that it was built or is being maintained on the cheap is not good.

Second, I could not see the driver's face, but his passenger was leaning forward, looking down at, well, almost leering at me in my little Miata. A passenger in a dump truck is bad news for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the tendency to make the driver want to show off. I could only surmise from the passenger's leer that the driver was saying something to the effect of "Watch me scare the shit out of this little faggot in the Miata!"

So the light changed and traffic started moving, and I laid on the gas and was outta there. The dump driver jumped on his accelerator and produced, probably to his chagrin, a great puff of black smoke and a slow, chugging start. Thus the second sign that this was trouble: badly maintained equipment does not respond well to force.

I'm within an ace of quoting from Serentity here, but I'll just paraphrase instead: you shouldn't drive a vehicle you don't love. You don't love it, you handle it badly, it runs out of shape, gets poorly maintained, and turns into a piece of crap eyesore and an impediment to others' navigations. So when the poor, dumb, asshole dump driver hopped on his accelerator in an attempt to scare the crap out of the poor little schmuck in the Miata, it was more or less like driving a spur into the side of an old, underfed mule.

I was well out of his way, but in the rear view I could see him, humping and straining and over-clutching, trying to get the truck up to speed. By the time he got the thing up to 30 miles an hour, he was well behind me and around the bend. Not my problem.

A few miles later traffic was stopped to make way for a bit of utility work. One of the crew's diggers needed to be turned, so they had traffic temporarily stopped in both directions, leaving a twenty-yard gap in the road between the two columns of stopped traffic. (This will be important in a moment.)

While sitting there, I saw a column of traffic approaching in the rear view, headed, of course, by the big, ugly, blue dump truck. (I probably forgot to mention the blue part earlier. I was concentrating on the ugly part.) I could see, just by casual observation, that the column was slowing.

But not the truck.

As it came up on me the driver swerved the behemoth into the opposing traffic lane, barely missing my bumper. And then I saw the real bad new. He was hauling an oversized heavy equipment trailer with a commercial road grader on it.

So not only was this asshole driving a badly maintained truck he didn't love, he was hauling a trailer and equipment that weighed way more than his truck had ever been rated for. Hey, watch me scare the shit out of this idjit in the Miata!

He came around me and the trailer just cleared my right rear fender, as I reflected that, had he snagged it, he not only would have tossed my car around like a cat with a sparrow, he would have ruptured my fuel intake and probably ripped out my gas tank, which was about 2/3 full. As it was, he cleared, and as he passed I heard the unmistakable sound of an engine and gearbox straining to slow more weight than they could have reasonably have been expected to haul in the first place, and smelled the unmistakable stench of burning brake pads on rusty discs.

He barrelled down the lane and managed to squeeze into the 20 yard gap, narrowly missing both flagmen, both of whom had to scramble out of the way. The digger was clear of the road by this point, and traffic was released by the flaggers, and the column of traffic sped up to a lively thirty miles an hour.

Slowed by the dump truck and it's trailer which had just barrelled through the stopped traffic, unable to stop itself.

I caught up to the monster at the next signal, where I was turning left and the Leviathan was struggling to advance from a dead stop, which it had acheived grudgingly. I scanned and committed to memory the tag on the trailer before concluding that reporting it would do no good. If the rest of the rig was that badly maintained, the odds that the tag on the trailer would in anyway correspond to the truck, much less the driver, were dismal indeed.

Crap.

I could have been killed by this rotten, lousy, loveless bastard, and there was zilch I could effectively do about it. What had been up to that point, a perfectly lovely drive was suddenly no damned fun at all. That was the real sin.

So what I dreamt of last night was catching the sonuvabitch in a parking lot, spotting the vehicle by it's damaged grill, dragging him down out of the cab, and reading him the Riot Act. Which is never a good thing for me. I am not heavily into revenge, and wrath makes me feel horribly guilty, no matter how richly it might be deserved. Along about midnight I finally decided to get up (for fear of my tossing and turning disturbing the Wifey), made my way out to the living room, lit a Camel, and downed a couple of vodkas, while trying to convince myself that none of this was in any way my fault. It wasn't the best night ever.