Parking Lot Rage

In the commuter lot where Tim and I pick up a slug to go to work every morning, the slugs wait in designated places amongst the rows of cars. There is a certain ebb and flow to the traffic of slugs and sometimes you get there and there's a long line of people waiting to get picked up, other days there's a long line of cars waiting to pick people up. Today was the latter.

When there is a line of cars, the cars, obviously, block about half of the row so that cars wanting to drive through this row to get to other locations in the lot in order to park or find a slug line have only 1/2 the width of the row in which to do this. Usually this isn't an issue as the convention has seemed to be that the directional flow of that other 1/2 matches the direction the cars waiting to pick up slugs. Thus, if you want to go in the other direction, you would go down a different aisle (one that doesn't have slugs in it so that both directions of traffic are available.)

Well, today someone decided to go in the opposite direction. At the same time that another car was following convention. They sat nose to nose for a few minutes, both drivers feeling they were in the right. Then the horn blowing began. This continued for a few minutes.

Then the driver of the car going in the "anti-conventional" direction gets out of his car, screaming and gesticulating at the other driver using language laced liberally with the F word. Just about every other word, in fact, started with F and ended with ck. And he wasn't talking about a firetruck. So he's now screaming at the other driver pressed up against the guy's door. The other driver opens his door and talks back. Which engenders more screaming.

Then the angry driver storms back to his car, slams the door, leans on the horn and his car leaps forward, closing the minute distance that had been between their car noses to basically nothing. Then more horn blowing and shouts of back the F up ensue. And he gets out of his car screaming again and converges on the other driver.

I think the other driver finally backed out (though there was another car behind him that had to back out first) so that angry man could have his way. But good grief. All I could think was that I was glad I was not a slug who had to ride with either of them, nor were either of them going to be the slug that got into my car.