Friday, April 8, 2011

Case of road rage, or something like that...

Yes it is true. Today while riding into the center of town, I accidentally incited a case of hardcore road rage (except without cars and a freeway), and I wound up flipping the bird to an old guy. Alright alright so before you pass your judgement and dismiss me as some kind of rude-asshole-young-punk-with-no-respect-for-my-elders, please allow me to plead my case. Ok so here's the situation. I'm cruising up to an intersection and this one is notorious for being a complicated mess of criss-crossing paths. As you pull into it you have cars and cyclists coming from the left as well as a ton of pedestrians (they sometimes look out for you and sometimes do not) and cyclists coming from the right and behind. Well in any case, it just happened to be a red light at the next intersection adjacent to this one, so some cars are jostling around, maneuvering themselves, shimmying and cramming into spots they really shouldn't go (this includes blocking the intersection for traffic trying to pass straight through). So I'm pulling in, I notice this older gentleman looking both ways trying to cross the street on foot. I stop, look left, and realize I have a window; the cars are crammed together and stopped alltogether. So I pull out, still looking left not really thinking about the gentleman trying to cross. I look right and then eff me there he is. I rolled a bit too far as I tried to shove off with my foot to gain momentum and I ended up pretty much giving the guy a flat tire (foreigners and others unfamiliar with the term please refer here and NOT the 2nd definition either), with my bike. Dang well look out. He turns around, swears loudly in dutch, "godverdomme!" and throws a smattering of other, carefully chosen dutch swear words in my direction. And I apologize. Put my hands up and told him, "Hey I'm sorry." Admitting it was my mistake. Anyhow so the verbal assault does not stop here. I end up having to stop a short ways up at the red light and I guess he was going my way because I see him to my right coming towards me from the sidewalk. This time he's speaking english telling me I'm not the only person in the world and that I should take off my sunglasses so that I can see properly (almost nearly came close to swiping them off my face). To my good fortune the light was turning green. I apologized once again and as I rolled away he was still yelling obscenities at me and this is when I'd had enough. I mean come on now, honestly, I admitted my mistake, apologized more than once but the guy was relentless. He wouldn't just accept it for what it was and that's when I flipped him the bird over my right shoulder. Don't care what people thought around me, maybe I shouldn't have flipped him off, but I think he really had it coming. So I did it. And it's all behind me. Get over it old man.


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