traffic

Monday morning started with a wide array of problems. People are such idiots, and it seems the older you get the more idiotic you become.

Take for example this:

My garage door is manually operated, as in, they're a set of wide swing doors that have a bunch of securing arms and must be opened by hand. Our garage is 5.5m long by 6.5m wide and fits exactly and very tightly 3 cars, two of them at less than 1 inch from the walls on the side, which gives us about 40cm to get in and out of the cars when all are parked inside. At the moment there's only two because of the jetta issues, anyway, so parking is relaxed, but that's no my point.

Since the door is wide, it opens out to the street and it needs to be swung to be closed, i have to park half the car on our mini driveway (1.9m long from the street edge to our garage door) leaving half the car on the street while i close it. I have no choice, if the car is too close, the door would hit the car and it'd be impossible to close because the door swings in an arch of 1.5m in radius, leaving most of the mini driveway useless when taking the cars out. Still, we're extremely considerate while taking out the cars; we turn our emergency blinkers on, we let all cars go through and so on. It's rarely been an issue.

Much consideration has been given throughout the years to replace the door. Many engineers and architects have taken good looks at the space and all have concluded there's no space to build anything that will allow us to install an automatic garage door that will give us freedom of space and movement. This is simply because there isn't enough space to do anything other than to store cars as our garage is a cement encased box. Had we installed at some point one of the older types of doors, we would have lost valuable ceiling space (which we need since my dad's truck is 1.79m tall and the garage is only 1.98m tall), or we could lose valuable length space (an average sedan will be about 4m in length).

Of course, now, when there's many more options to do this, we can't afford any of them, so the door has and will remain like this for years to come. Then again, this is completely counter intuitive, because the manual garage door takes time to open and close, leaving ourselves exposed to potential danger, if somebody would want to rob us or something.

Anyway. Another important thing to point out is that the street we're on has a 40km/h limit, which nobody should exceed because our house is located on the out side of a tight curve that has no visibility to what is coming because of a property with a big wall on the in side of the curve, and everybody should take caution when driving up or down the road. Then again nobody does.

This morning I started the car to let it warm up a bit while i opened the door, went and opened the door and proceeded to get in the car, drive it out of the garage and neatly park it half and half, as described above, in front of the garage entrance.

As I got out of the car to close the garage door I see a green '99 corolla approaching the curve way too fast and driving down the middle of the road. I could see the face of the driver, an older man probably in his 70's with white hair and a grumpy face. He was driving too fast of course, and in order to avoid an accident due to the curve he needed to break abruptly, which he did while flipping me off and honking his shreeky horn at me.

I asked myself, what did I do? Why are you honking at me? You saw my car from a distance with the emergency blinkers on, had plenty of time to break and there was plenty of space for 2 cars and most definitely enough space for you to go around safely. On top of this there was nobody coming up, which should have made this a non-issue.

I stood there looking at him with my arms extended inquisitively while he drove away.

I have to admit i was a little angry that this guy would do something so irresponsible and then blame his poor driving on my lack of money to get a fancy automatic garage door. I finishes closing the door and drove away.

But guess what.

At the entrance of our neighbourhood there's a newspaper stand, and he was buying newspaper.

I stopped the car, lowered my window and while perfectly faking a kind mood called out to the older man.

"Excuse me! Excuse me sir!", I called. He turned around with a puzzled look on his face.
I asked, "why did you honk at me and flip me off just now?", to which he replied with an angry tone "Because you were parked in the middle of the curve you moron".

I kept my face straight and kind and said, "sir, i live there, I have no choice but to park that way while i take my car out of the garage. You saw the car from a distance and yet did nothing about it". Then he said, and this drove me over the edge "you came out of nowhere punk and cut me off, learn how to drive".

He was being irrational, where does he get the balls to say something like that?. I reconsidered my mild attitude, as I didn't come from out of nowhere nor did cut him off, my car was stopped and I was outside of my car.

I told him in a more aggressive tone "it's not my problem you can't drive properly, you were coming in too fast, were not paying attention and you lie, I didn't cut you off. My car was parked, my blinkers were on on and I was ouside the car, and you had more than enough space to go through. More so, i'm not insulting you I strongly suggest you respect me, as I've shown nothing but respect for you. Get your act together before you make any accusations. I park that way because my garage door doesnt allow me to park any other way, if you don't like it, you buy me a new door."

His face was a deep shade of red, highlighted by his white hair. I think at some level he knew i was right and had no way out. He proceeded to flip me off, again. I told him to grow up and to take some viagra and get woman. We both drove away.


Lesson: nobody won. We behaved like children. I am 24, I still have the right to behave like a spoiled child, as most men my age do. But him, i had never expected it. I can speculate upon many reasons for his behaviour, but only he knows. Perhaps he was having a bad day, perhaps he is like this every day. Whatever the reason, i hope not to cross paths with him again because i cannot foretell the result of such a rematch.

However childish it may sound, i think i have the right to say he started it, and he aggravated it.




On to daily duties!

So far today i haven't done much and the day holds no promise of action. I just found out from general science guy that the kid who borrowed my crazy glue on friday didn't think of poking the tip with a needle to let the glue flow, instead he squeezed hard enough to have the back of the tube open... big mess. At least I wasn't aware of the incident and maintainance took care of the spilt glue, i don't share my acetone with anybody.

I took the laptops to chemistry guy's room and left them for him to use today. Right now I shall log on to yahoo answers and see if i can share knowledge with anybody, and perhaps learn something.

The afternoon was equally dull, a little copying here and there and I made some 0.1M NaOH for some colourimetric reactions. How lucky i am that there was crystal violet already made.

Yeah, life's that easy.
Cheers to you.