Irreverence is Justified

I got a new car for the wife a couple of days ago, and as you have probably guessed from the title, it’s a Ford Focus 1.8 Tdci Titanium.

It’s rather nice. Much faster than her old Corsa, but then the engine is almost twice as powerful. Got it second hand, it’s a year old, and as such got it for half the price that we’d have had to pay for it brand new (£10.5K against £21.2K new; sweet). Strangely, it came with no user manual whatsoever. How odd to sell your car but you want to keep the manual? Weird.

It’s got a built in sat nav which is pretty nice, it has to be said. I’ve got a Garmin in my car, one of the type that you attach to your window, and I do like it, but the fact that this one is built in is really pretty sweet.

I believe you can get your phone to link up to the car via bluetooth. Tried to work out how to do it, but I have failed. I’ll need to get a manual, I reckon, to work it out. That said, I’ll try Googling around first, see if anyone has any tips on how to do it.

I’ve come to the conclusion that driving instructors in the UK are giving some women different instructions about what to do at a roundabout.

You’ll have been there yourself if you’re a driver. You’re sitting behind a car at a roundabout which has 4 exits, and you pretty well almost drive in to the back of the car because you assume they are about to move due to having the right of way. But they don’t. They sit there, giving way to anyone no matter where they are entering the roundabout from, and what direction they are going. Even if they are not going to go anywhere near the person in front of you, they still wait.

Until there are no more cars left. Then they go.

So anytime you’ve seen this, check out who it is who’s driving. I’ve been driving for 18 years and I’ve seen this happen countless times, and only once has it been a bloke. Once. The other 31,337 times it’s been a chick. Every. Other. Time.

I figure what happens is that a driving instructor, while teaching, comes to the conclusion that the woman he’s teaching isn’t that confident and decides to teach them a different rule to everyone else. The rule everyone else gets is “give way to cars from the right”. Unconfident chicks get told “don’t move until there are no other cars in sight”. They may get told this because they’ll likely kill themselves, and others, if they try it any other way. But that’s just a guess.

I just find it interesting that it’s (almost) always a woman who does this. Much like it’s almost always a bloke who accelerates far too hard when the lights go green. Just an observation – check it out yourself and tell me if I’m wrong. Everyone I’ve explained this to irl (including women, before you ask) have agreed that it does appear to be true.

Men and Women. Different, but one is not superior to the other.

I’m driving home tonight, about to go through some traffic lights, and I hear a police siren. You know what happens next – everyone stops. The problem is that the police car was behind us in the line of cars and therefore could no longer move, but we’re all sitting there like lemons not moving.

Why? Simple; because we couldn’t tell where the police car was. It was literally 2 cars behind me, but I couldn’t tell from what direction the siren was blaring out, so I had to stop and look 360 degrees all around me to work it out, and in the meantime the police car is sitting there with 2 frustrated-looking police dudes in it.

I have empathy for them – they are blaring their siren to say to people “Out of the way, fuck sake!” but it had exactly the opposite effect. Indeed, if they had just kept the siren off they would probably have got on better.

An ambulance car thing had the right idea yesterday. It just decided to drive on the other side of the road the entire way along the road. We had pretty much no choice but to start driving in the bike lane, but it resolved their problem. No siren needed – just drive head-first in to oncoming traffic. High risk strategy but with high returns.

There have been a few fuel protests here in the UK of late. There are a couple of things I find utterly ridiculous about these protests.

First off, the lorry drivers are going to drive at 15mph for many hours. Driving at this speed will use up a significantly larger amount of fuel than if they had driven at a normal speed. So they are protesting by buying more fuel – the very thing they are moaning about.

The second thing is that the people who are most affected by this protest are other vehicle users on the road. The one thing those people have in common? They all need to buy fuel, therefore know it’s really expensive. So the protesters are simply disadvantaging people who already know fuel is expensive.

Am I not realising something here? I can’t understand what the fuel protesters think they are achieving by these actions.

Madness.

Crikey. I always thought that motorbikes who skipped through between 2 lanes of queueing traffic were breaking the law. But apparently not. Sorry, motorbike riders.

One thing (one of many, that is) that really annoys me about drivers is people trying to skip a queue. There’s a set of traffic lights that I go through on my way home from work, and there are 2 lanes that lead up to them. The outside lane turns right and the left lane goes straight ahead. About 95% of the cars want to go straight on, so what some people do is go up the outside lane and then try to push their way in towards the front of the queue, which works quite a lot as there’s a left hand turn just before the traffic lights.

I’m thinking here that I need to subject you to a crappy graphic that I have made in an attempt to describe this a little easier:

Hopefully you can follow that. The traffic is going from right to left, maybe I should have drawn it the other way around. Oh well, you’re stuck with it. There are 2 junctions with traffic lights on them and a fair few people turn left at junction [1] while hardly anyone goes right at junction [2], so people pile up the right hand lane and attempt to barge in to the left lane between the two junctions.

Today, a woman (it’s rarely a woman who barges in, it’s usually blokes) attempted to barge in when we were driving at about 1mph. Her car was literally 3 inches from my door, and as I had my window down I could easily have touched it with my hand; probably with my elbow, she was so close. And I’d just let a bus barge in in front of me, so it wasn’t as if I was being a complete git and not letting anyone in!

It’s fair to say I was rather upset, as I usually am when knob-ends attempt to push in at this junction. People wouldn’t skive a queue like this in a shop; why do they feel it’s acceptable to do it just because they’re in a car?

Road rage is likely to happen at this junction one day, not necessarily by me, but someone, as I’m not the only one who gets pissed off with this. Go to the end of the bloody queue, fool!

Oh dear. I’ve seen some ugly cars in my time, but nothing close to this monstrosity.

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in the UK, we have bus lanes. These lanes are typically used by buses, taxis and cycles during designated hours of the day and/or night.

However, it appears some, if not most, car drivers in the UK are actually idiots as they don’t seem to recognise that these bus lanes are not all in use 24 hours of the day.

The deal is simple. There are signs next to bus lanes telling you what types of vehicle can use them, and when. That’s right, when. However, many drivers seem to think that you can’t drive in them ever.

Daft buggers.

In some cities in the UK, these bus lanes are coloured green to make them really obvious. It seems the problem is even more prevalent in these cities in that people really don’t want to drive in them outside of the hours that they are in effect. Instead, they’ll just sit in the outside lane of a dual carriageway blocking the traffic behind.

It’s fair to say it upsets me somewhat.