January 14, 2009

CONFIRMATION? OH NOES!

I was attacked by the confirmation troll again. OH NOES!

(spotted that mask at a Party City, by the way)
Hi Robeast:
Please see below. L___ is out of the office this week and, therefore, the contact for the videoconference on Thursday is L___-____. Please confirm once this has been confirmed. Thanks.
No. Thank you. I don't know what to do first. Confirm the confirmation, or have the confirmation confirmed? This logic makes me want to run over myself.

I almost really ran a girl over last Saturday. It would have been 100% her fault had it actually happened. I was in the right lane on a two-lane one-way street at a 4-way intersection on a dark, snowy, icy day in Hoboken. The light turned green and I started to go. I didn't realize that some dumb fucking pedestrian decided to cross against the light until she was nearly doubled over onto my hood. She didn't actually touch the car at all, so I felt no reason to berate her frozen brain cells for telling her that her body is stronger than a car's any further than however stupid she probably felt on her own.

I have no sympathy for people that don't follow simple rules like "Cross at the green, and not in between." As a driver, I have 56 potential points of conflict that I need to be aware of at a 4 way intersection. I know this because it says so right here:

Engineers calculate that a four-way intersection has 56 potential points of what they call "conflict," or as Vanderbilt says, "the chance for you to run into someone" — 33 places to hit a car and 24 spots to hit a pedestrian.
As a pedestrian, all you have to do is look up at the fucking Walk or Don't Walk sign, or god forbid, the pretty colored light at the intersection, then look both ways (or in this case, one way!) to make sure the drivers are following the rules too. Then, have your brain either tell your legs to go or not. It's a lot easier for you to stop moving than it is for me and my 4-door death machine. Had I been approaching the intersection already in motion instead of from a stopped position, I surely would not have been able to stop in time. Actually, the SUV in the left lane probably would've nailed her first, so I guess I had nothing to worry about. Maybe I'll put up an exciting diagram sometime later this week.

All right, if anyone hasn't seen this yet, now you're seeing it.

No excuses. Unless you get hit by a car. My car.

I should also mention now that it's taken me an hour to get this post correctly formatted. Blogger gets confused when I try to use ultra-demanding features like italics, or a different font for a few lines. I am also clearly pushing Blogger to its extremes by copying text that I wrote in Microsoft Word and pasting it into its own text editor. Thank you Blogger for keeping up with my demanding blog lifestyle. You are a car, Blogger, and I am once again bowled over. Thanks.

1 comment:

trix oh said...

i am reading this from the other room.