Hey. Asshole.

There’s a word for people who cut you off, in traffic. They speed into your lane and bring things to a jarring, albeit momentary, halt. While it is unpleasant and thoughtless, it happens to millions of drivers every day. People are in a rush on their way to work, or to drop their kids off at school, so forth. It happens.

That’s not what this guy did. There’s a frequently congested intersection on my way to work that forks into two lanes only about 20 feet from the stoplight. It gets so that people are unofficially creating that second lane, several feet in advance. There wouldn’t be any *real* problem with this, if that single-lane road didn’t intersect with another road, right before the fork. So, in addition to faking a second lane, considerate drivers leave that gap so that people coming in the opposite direction can cross, if they need to, without jamming traffic the other way.

This morning, I was on gap detail, for all of 60 seconds. I wasn’t going anywhere, as there was really nowhere to go until the light ahead turned green. Then, the honking started. This asshole, immediately behind me, swerves into traffic to butt ahead in line. He (saw him, definitely a guy) didn’t just cut me off, he deliberately drove around me. Not that it did him any good. He just took up more of the road, effectively getting maybe 12 feet closer, including the length of my own car.

He’s lucky no one was crossing that gap when he did it, or he would have sideswiped. I don’t normally honk my horn, or give any other signals of anger when I’m driving. I pressed into my horn for a full ten seconds and flipped this f*cktard a flock of birds that would have made my friend Chris proud.

Now, in the asshole’s defense, he must have been terribly smart. Really. He obviously skipped kindergarten and advanced right to first grade, back in the day. That’s the only explanation I can think of for him not learning that you wait your turn in line. It’s one of the first things you learn, isn’t it? Maybe he didn’t skip the class, maybe he was just sick the day they covered it. And every day he would have had to stand in a line for a god damned minute and a half, up until today.

It got me good and mad. I’m over it now, but there was that nice serving of vitriol in my stomach, for the rest of the drive to work. Sheesh.

Asshole.