[4638] in Depressing_Thoughts
Drivers are human...
cfields@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (cfields@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Aug 14 21:48:35 1994
I was skating Vassar towards Mass. Ave. just now. When I skate that
direction I skate on the wrong side, because the right side isn't
skatable and there's plenty of room - especially right now, when no
cars are parked there. I still normally skate behind where the cars
would be parked even though they're not there. The road is a lot
cleaner.
So this car is coming the other way, and annoyingly is using all the
extra space it has available so I can't stay on the clean part of the
road and have to move over. But it also keeps drifting more towards
the curb, and I interpret the action as contempt on the driver's part
that I'm on that part of the road (or that he's just a jerk) and that
he's trying to scare me or whatever by making me think he's trying to
hit me (it did look like this, and people _do_ do this to me on
occasion). So I stayed out of his way and flipped him off as he
passed, and he yelled something at me as he went by.
Then he stopped and turned around to come back, and I'm thinking, oh
great, he's *really* a jerk and he's going to pretend to run me over
again only from behind this time, or something equally nasty.
But no... He was really upset because he really hadn't seen me there,
and apparently it scared him considerably when he finally noticed me
there and he was really worried that he might have run me over and was
asking me in a somewhat raised voice if I really wanted to get killed.
I explained to him why I was where I was, that while he didn't see me
I certainly saw him, and for my part was not at all worried about
being hit because I had plenty of space and time to move out of his
way. But he said that since he doesn't skate he doesn't know what my
abilities might be....
While I might not be expected to be there moving in that direction,
there's no reason I might not have been moving in the other direction
which is quite legitimate, though in that case my light might have
caught his eye. But this was a well lit area, and I am wearing bright
colors, and if he had been paying attention he would have seen me, and
probably also wouldn't have been drifting so much.
But he was very upset and I feel kind of bad about it. Sigh.
