So despite the self-centric introduction in Part 1 of this series, this story isn't about me, it's about someone who apparently hates me.
Picture this: there I was, just another traffic bound civilian, trying to merge onto I-285, the Perimeter, and not very happy at all about even having to be out there for all the reasons explained in Part 1. A large part of my commute each way and every day is negotiating about two miles or so of the Perimeter that I have to take on in order to get to and from the office. I spend more time on that two-mile stretch than I do on the other 10 or so miles of my commute. Every day, it seems, the Perimeter consists solely of slow-moving lanes of grid-locked cars, not just in the morning and evening rush hours, but depressingly, most of the day lately. There's no getting around (or through) it, and I'm forced to slowly merge onto the highway if I want to get to or from work and then creep along for the next 10 to 15 minutes as the traffic allows. I feel a sense of accomplishment once I finally get through - at last, now I can drive again - and I've come to think of the Perimeter as some sort of membrane surrounding the city that I have to penetrate if I want to get in or out of the ATL.
So there I was, as I was saying, on Monday morning, attempting my morning penetration of the membrane to get outside the big ovum that is Atlanta, waiting for the slightest gap in traffic to allow me to merge into the first stack of cars. I wasn't happy about being there, I never am, and neither, I imagine, is most anyone else. No one likes merging with the slow-moving membrane. Patience is thin, and road rage is not uncommon.
I got into my lane, eventually, and crept forward with the traffic toward my exit. One little trick move that I learned over the years is that after I pass the next entrance, I can veer to the right over into the merge lane, which eventually becomes the exit lane I need to use to leave the membrane. This lets me by-pass several of the stacked cars in the grid-locked lane and zip up to my exit. The problem is that other people have discovered this little trick as well, and use the merge lane to jump ahead of several cars in the stack and then merge back into the traffic before they reach the exit, which blocks the lane while they're waiting for a chance to merge back in. It's basically the same thing as cutting in line, but as I pointed out no one's happy to be there and everyone is looking for any short-cut they can find.
So I got up to the point where the entrance ramp becomes the merge lane, checked my side-view mirror to make sure no one was coming up the ramp, and made my move to the right into the merge lane. What I didn't see was that a motorist one or two cars back from me decided to make the same move at the same time, and when I merged over, I cut him off forcing him to brake hard (he was driving up the lane way too fast in my opinion, although I'm sure from his perspective, some chowderhead had just cut him off without warning).
Angrily, he followed behind me way too close as I drove up the merge lane following - in turn and at a safer distance, of course - the car ahead of me. Following too close is a sort of passive aggressive way of showing displeasure in Atlanta driving protocols. But suddenly and without warning, the car in front of me decided that he saw the space where he wanted to merge back into the main flow of traffic, and he abruptly hit his brakes and stopped to wait for a chance to merge back in, cutting me and my tail-gating friend off. I had to stop hard not to hit the car in front of me, and could only hope that the guy too close behind me had the reflexes and the brakes to stop in time too.
He did and we avoided collision, but I could only imagine how mad he must be at me now, first for pulling over in front of him and now for my albeit necessary quick stop.
The shoulder was wide enough for me to drive around the forward car, still waiting to merge to the left, so I swung around to the right to get around his blockade. But once again, just as I did, the car following me had apparently decided to do the same and pass the two of us, so as I swung around the stopped car, I cut off the guy behind me for the third time.
And that, apparently, was more that he was willing to accept. Rather than concede me the lane, he drove - at very high speed - off of the shoulder and around the two of us, his right tires on the hardscrabble roadside gravel. I saw him on my right, off the road and glaring at me as I was on the shoulder passing the first car.
Neither of us, until that moment, saw the cop. The cop was parked on the shoulder just in front of where the front motorist had decided to stop to merge back left. The car formerly behind me but now on my right and quickly gaining the lead was on a collision course with the parked police car. Fortunately for everybody, he didn't hit the car but slammed his brakes hard and skidded on the gravel to a quick stop just behind the cop, and then had to let me pass on ahead as he maneuvered back, first onto the shoulder and then the exit lane, to get around the cop.
The last I saw in my rearview mirror as I took the exit was the cop had his flashing lights on and was pulling over the guy who had almost just hit him.
I admit to no wrong-doing here, but can you imagine how angry that guy must be with me now? He gets, in his mind, cut off not once, not twice, but three times, and then winds up getting pulled over and probably ticketed all because of some other idiot on the highway. He hates me, I'm sure, and I'm lucky he never got a chance to get his hands on me.
He wasn't happy, I'm sure, but I didn't even want to be there in the first place either. I never wanted to be a commuter in rush-hour Atlanta, I never wanted to be in a dead-end job, I never wanted to have to penetrate the the membrane twice a day just to make a living. And I never wanted to incite someone into road-rage, and certainly not to the point where they got ticketed. Although part of me did snicker in satisfaction when I saw him getting pulled over after he was badgering and harrassing me on the road.
Anyhow, the World Series, Game 2, starts in a few minutes and I'm going to go watch the game now with the Sports Desk.
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