Tag: driving

I managed to not kill anyone today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.

(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)

I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.

A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.

Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.

And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.

I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.

(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.

On motorcycle-type things

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I have had the idea for several years now that in the unlikely event that I were to decide to become a Motorcycle Person, I would quite likely become a boring Motorcycle Person. I’d end up in one of those oversized, three-wheeled jobs with an oversized windshield and lots of places for storage– I think the technical term for them is “baggers.” The type, frankly, that if I spot on the road are likely to be driven by someone with a decade or two on me even considering my advanced age. The excitement/danger factor of riding a motorcycle doesn’t really impress me; in fact, it’s quite the opposite; I think I’d spend most of my time terrified of being run off the road by a car and part of the reason I’m more attracted to a larger, more stable vehicle is they just feel safer. I can’t ride a bicycle, remember; the notion of one that goes 70 miles an hour is not inherently attractive.

Anyway, I was driving home from work today and I noticed the person in front of me was driving … probably not that exact vehicle, but close enough for our purposes. He was, in accordance with prophecy, grey-bearded, somewhat portly, and wearing a full helmet, and while obviously I couldn’t get a good look at his face, he vibed as a guy in his late fifties or maybe early sixties.

As I was following him, I was musing about more or less exactly the same things I’ve been talking about in the last couple of paragraphs. I’ve not seen many of these things with the two wheels in front, which was kind of interesting, but I think I prefer the traditional style.

After a mile or so, a guy pulled up beside us. This guy was younger, helmetless, and riding a stripped-down crotch-rockety sort of thing that was more or less the exact opposite of the first guy’s bike, and in fact the type of thing that I’m absolutely certain I will never ride, because I will die.

The second guy said something to the first guy. I obviously couldn’t hear it or seem him well enough to read his lips, but his body language seemed more or less friendly and positive? The first guy, perfectly reasonably I thought, pointed to his helmet (which looked like the kind with headphones built in, so he was probably listening to music, too) and made a sort of sorry, dude, I can’t hear you gesture.

Bro went nuts.

Traffic is reasonably heavy on my evening drive, and so my guy on the trike managed to stay in front of the motorcycle guy mostly by just staying in his lane, and to be completely honest I’m not even convinced he was aware of the guy, since again, he had his helmet on and the guy was behind him. He was right to my right, though, so I got to witness a bunch of unhinged screaming and yelling and occasional attempts to get ahead of him. Eventually he found an opening, drove between two cars, and pulled in front of the guy, nearly clipping him in the process, then found a hole and got far enough away that I lost track of him. And other than the part where the dude nearly hit him, I really don’t know how much of probably two solid minutes of spittle-flecked raving the trike driver even realized was happening. Good thing the stupid bastard didn’t have a gun, I suppose.

Anyway, I’m keeping my car.

How to Drive Without Killing Me: A Basic Lesson for People Who Don’t Want to be Fucking Morons

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Okay, y’all, see that lane I’ve marked with a blue arrow?

If you are driving in that lane, and there are stopped cars in front of you because of a light or a stop sign or whatever, and someone is waiting to turn left across traffic into a parking lot or a retail establishment or whatthefuck ever, do not ever ever ever under any circumstances stop early to let that motherfucker turn left in front of you.

Don’t do it. Don’t ever do it. You’re not being nice. You’re trying to cause a fucking car accident, and I hate you because you’re an idiot and you shouldn’t be driving.

Had some dipshit pull this move on me this morning, while I was in the lane on the far left, and of course that fucking slapnuts was driving a F4500 or whatever the fuck the big truck for guys with tiny dicks is, and because the yellow car can’t see through the car that is waiting for them, and the oncoming traffic in the far left lane can’t see the yellow car either, that stupid son of a bitch turned directly in front of me and damn near got T-boned for his trouble. Even a tiny bit of ice on the roads or the slightest bit of distraction and my ass would have totaled my car and his.

And, I tell you what, if I get into an accident under those circumstances, and I live through it? I’m not gonna blame the person I hit, even though they’re also a moron for turning directly into a blind spot. I’m coming after the idiot who stopped and let them through. I will flip your Goddamned car over with my bare hands.

You’re not being nice. You’re going to get someone killed. Anyone who needs to turn left should expect to have to wait until it’s clear.

Don’t fucking do it.

A brief note to drivers

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

If y’all don’t mind, I’d like this to become my most famous post ever. I want this getting 10,000 views a day for the rest of my life. I want it shared in drivers’ ed classes. Hell, I want it to be the only topic of entire days of drivers’ ed classes.

If you stop, unpredictably, in order to allow someone to pull from a side road or exit from a business and turn left in front of you, ESPECIALLY if you are already in the left lane of traffic when you do this, you should lose your license. On the spot. It should self-destruct inside your goddamn wallet and burn a painful hole in your ass. And once you have lost your license and bandaged your burnt ass, whoever is behind you and managed to avoid rear-ending your ignorant self should get to choose one of your body parts (possibly the other unburnt half of your ass) to cut off and wear around as a hat.  

The protection of the law should no longer apply to you if you make a decision like this.

Fucking stop it.

In conclusion, I hate you and hope you die. Which, given how you drive, will probably happen sooner rather than later.

The end.

In which I live to serve, but not for much longer

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work1 Comment

butler-rhettActual Fiction has happened today; not much, but nonetheless Actual Fiction, so I feel pretty good about the universe right now.  I was supposed to spend the morning taking care of my last Act of Ridiculous Customer Service (why, sure, I’ll drive to Michigan and pick up the seat of your armless chair and drop it off at the leather reconditioning place so you don’t have to do it!  Why not?) but the timing ended up not working out so I’m probably doing that tomorrow.

This will be the last time I drive anywhere for a customer, which pleases me.  It probably seems slightly more unreasonable than it actually is, at least in my head; I don’t always have a lot to do on my days off and if I’m just going to spend the day on the couch playing video games or staring at HGTV I may as well drive for a bit and listen to some podcasts instead, y’know?  Yeah, gas costs money, but so does everything else, so I’m not going to worry about it all that much.

Anyway.  The world seems to be a bit more on fire than usual this week and there’s a Big Corporate Visit coming next week at work so I’ve been mostly keeping my head down.  Anything going on out there that doesn’t involve disaster?

Adventures in customer service

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Work3 Comments

IMG_6872
The kid’s doing well, in case you were wondering.  Also, the iPhone’s Portrait Mode is ridiculous.

So last weekend sometime I sold a sectional.  I am absolutely religious about checking ETA dates whenever I order furniture, as you are probably aware if you’ve ever read any of my posts about my job before.  I absolutely despise dealing with pissed-off people, which makes me the most honest salesperson on the planet, because I’ll lose a sale in a second before I’ll misrepresent when something is gonna come into the store.  Because you’re gonna notice, and I’m not gonna want to deal with you when you do.

So.  A bit of background: our company has two main warehouses.  Our upholstered product is all supposed to come to us from one of them, but if that warehouse is out of a particular piece and the other warehouse has it, we can send an email and switch which warehouse it comes from and it still shows up on the same timeline.  I do this a lot, as you can probably imagine.  However, the person who responds to those emails works banker’s hours.  So I was rather dismayed on Monday to discover that a particular piece had sold out from the secondary warehouse over the weekend and that I now couldn’t get it until– wait for it– June, when I told my customers to expect it in the store in 7 to 10 days.

June is farther away than 7 to 10 days.

No problem!  I found one at our Lafayette store, and decided that rather than wait for a truck to come through from their store to ours and hope that they remembered to put the piece on that truck, I’d just go get it myself today.  It’s like a two hour drive.  I have a former student who I’m still in touch with and quite fond of who is a sophomore at Purdue, so I’ve got somebody to grab lunch with, too!  I’ll go get the piece and have lunch and come back and drop it off at the store and nobody’s the wiser and I’ll lose a chunk of my commission on gas money but whatever.  I like the occasional car trip.

Go ahead, check the weather report for today for northern Indiana.  Because holy Christ, why did I do that stupid thing I did.  I have never seen fog in my life like the Lovecraftean, Ravenloft-esque insanity that I had to drive through today.  We’re talking maybe three seconds of visibility in front of the car, less on the heavy spots, for the first two thirds of the trip.  I thought about turning back repeatedly, consistently falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy and reasoning that surely I was damn near out of the fog by now and that it would be, would have to be, gone by the time I was on my way home.

Also, once I got to campus, my GPS utterly shit the bed, trying at one point to send me the wrong way down a one-way street, then redirecting me to another street that it could have just left me on the entire time rather than taking me out of its way to nearly die, and then directing me into an alley between two buildings that abruptly turned into a bike path that just-as-abruptly turned into nothing, at which point I called my former student and described where I was as best I could, informing her that I wasn’t moving my car again and she needed to come find me.

(Also: I’m not a complete idiot.  The other problem with Purdue’s campus is that there are damn near no signs anywhere.  Signs that say things like “No Exit,” which one might put before a point-of-no-return road of some sort.)

Also, Logansport, Indiana is the worst place in the world and I don’t want to hear any different from any of you.  I got directed through “town” for some reason and half of the place was utterly deserted and everyone in the rest of it had the Innsmouth look.  I deliberately took a different route back to avoid the town.

We lingered over lunch, at any rate.  I was the oldest person in the restaurant by at least 18 years and we were both vastly entertained by the literal hush that fell over the room when we walked in, as everyone tried to figure out if I was a sugar daddy or not.  When the hell did college students get so Goddamned young?

I was planning on being home by 2:00 and didn’t bother leaving West Lafayette until after 1:00, figuring that the fog would have to have burned off by then.

Nope.  Just as bad on the way home as on the way down there, except without the opportunity to turn back.  Also, west central Indiana smells terrible.  That sounds like I’m just being mean because of IU vs. Purdue regionalisms and I swear I’m not.  It smells awful.

Point is, I think I deserve a tip for this one.

So, my car

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

Screen Shot 2017-05-25 at 5.02.01 PMI done fucked up today, I think.

My current car is a 2001 Ford Escape with nearly a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it.  The fabric on the driver’s side door is mostly peeled off, there are big patches of rust inside all the doors, and there’s a big crack in the rear bumper.  The radio intermittently decides it needs to take a rest and won’t turn back on for anywhere from a few seconds to a day.  It leaks oil from a leak so deep in the engine that repairing it is an absurdity.  And its gas mileage… well, leaves something to be desired.

That said: it turns on when I need it to turn on and it gets me where I want to go, and while it’s loud as hell at speed it’s not an uncomfortable ride by any means.  It’s just that at 170K it is only a matter of time until something breaks that will be pointless to repair.  To get ahead of myself a bit, I was offered $1200 for it as a trade today and I think it was probably a pretty generous offer, all told.

The boy has named the car Joey Car Kristofferson.  I will very much miss having a car named Joey Car Kristofferson, to the point where I will probably insist that its replacement be named Joey Car Kristofferson II.  (My wife’s car, incidentally, is called Lisa Car James.  Don’t ask where the boy got the names.  No one knows.)

So anyway, I took that car up there for a test drive earlier today.  It’s a 2016 Kia Soul in the + trim level, with 28,000 miles on it.  It’s immaculately clean and seems to run beautifully.  It’s small– trunk space, in particular, is kind of a joke– but it fits my main need in a vehicle, which is that it rides high enough that I climb into the seat and slide out, rather than the other way around.  I refuse to struggle to get out of my car, which means I’ll never own a sedan again.  I’ve started to seriously hate them.  I test drove a brand-new Ford Escape a few months ago, and loved it, but financially I think it’s a better idea to go for a lightly used vehicle right now rather than a new one.  Unless I lease, which I might choose to do but <insert every website and argument about leasing ever> and my brain isn’t set up for that right now.

It’s just under fifteen thousand bucks, that car, and with the financing I’d expect to get I’d probably be making payments of just over $200 a month.  Which is in the neighborhood where I’m thinking Yeah, I can swing that rather than I can afford that.  To my mind, that’s a real difference; you can swing a new purchase if you can come up with some ways to cut costs that would absorb a lot of the new bill and figure you’ll be okay.  You can afford something if you don’t have to think at all about what you’ll do to pay for it.  For example, I can afford to spend $25-50 pretty much whenever I want so long as I don’t, like, do it every day.  But if I want to buy a new shirt or something?  I don’t have to think about that.  A car payment means I’m thinking things like well, I do eat out way too often anyway and I’m spending too much fucking money on comic books every week while I’m considering what it would do to my budget.  And the down payment would have to come out of our mutual savings, which my wife will likely have something to say about.  We did just drop three and a half grand on a new bed, after all.

I’m not sure I have a point here, and I don’t know if I’m asking for advice or just talking.  I just need to decide how quickly I think I need a new car, and whether I should buy a new one before I need a new one.

Go buy some of my books and make this easier, dammit.  🙂

A quick question for everyone (music)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music17 Comments

kendrick_lamar_grammys_performance_rhceuz.jpgAs I was driving home I was listening to music and reflecting on how I really need to find a way to put a car into my living room somewhere.  Either that or I need to invest in a really high-quality pair of headphones.

Why?  Because more and more lately the car seems to be the best place for me to absorb music.  I still buy at least two or three new albums every single month, and some are heavier than others.  I seem to be rather unique in that among the adults I know; I just asked my wife when the last time she bought new music was and she thought for a long time and said it might have been before our son was born.

He just turned 5, remember.

1383089177_5d7c613188689706de8fdb506ca69d95.pngSo, yeah: I still spend a decent amount of money on music.  In fact, other than books and comics, music is the thing I spend the largest share of my discretionary income on.   And what I’m finding is that until I’ve listened to a new album in my car, it’s as if I haven’t heard it at all.  This was driven home recently by the first time I listened to a recent Hopsin album in the car.  I’d listened to it over and over again at home, and I mean it: it was like I’d never heard it before.  I appreciated that album so much more after keeping it in rotation in the car for a while than I had when had just listened to it on my computer– and my computer has good speakers!

(You might be wondering why there’s a picture of Kendrick Lamar at the top of this post.  Same deal. I never properly appreciated Kendrick until listening to him while I was driving.)

Anyway, here’s the question: Are you, as a presumed adult (and if you’re not an adult, let me know and then answer anyway,) still buying music?  And where’s the best place for you to listen to it?