Molt Be Blog

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Crossing The Street

For those that haven't seen them, in DC they have timers on the pedestrian crossing signs that count down how long you have left to make it across the street. Walking with two coworkers to lunch yesterday, we approached a sign that indicated there were 11 seconds left to cross Massachusetts avenue at its intersection with 18th street. As we aren't old ladies we all decided (in our heads, mind you) that this was long enough to cross the street and kept walking. A pickup truck that wanted to make a right turn stopped to wait for us to cross. As we made it across the double-yellow line, the driver of the pickup made his turn, stopped, leaned out the window and said, "I know you have the right of way, but you're still ignorant pieces of shit."
Needless to say, we were all quite surprised at his statement. None of us responded. Later, I wished I'd said something witty but also realized that, had I said anything, it would have contained several curse words and would have involved sinking to his level.
What baffled us all, is that he chose to include the part about knowing that we had the right of way. To me, this indicated his own ignorance. I decided that he had probably made a conscious decision to call us "ignorant pieces of sh*t", but noticed that the sign was still indicating that we could walk just before he opened his mouth and then decided to include his knowledge of this information in his statement. He sped off and probably felt pretty good. We just felt like sitting down with him and picking his brain as to what he was thinking as he leaned out that window.

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