Road Rage Redux

I have been the victim of road rage five times.  Not including incidents on the New Jersey Turnpike which may or may not have been instigated by me.  The first time was by two scary dudes in a scary pickup truck on their way home from a construction job site (I assume from the ladders and tools).  No shocker there.  The second was by a Lexus driving lawyer (I surmise) with a five year old kid in the backseat.  Apparently I wasn't driving fast enough for him on a one lane road when he passed me on the right, in the shoulder, and cursed me out as he passed.  No shock there either but I am interested in meeting this kid when she is a teenager.  Over privileged will probably be an under statement.  The third and fourth times were by mini van driving soccer moms (I infer, from their choice of vehicles and frenetic rush to no where).  And the latest incident was perpetrated by a fiftyish woman on her way to work (I presume because it was 7:30 in the morning and she was wearing a business suit).  I list the events in chronological order of occurrence beginning in the early part of this century until present day.  Do you see a gender trend?  One more interesting fact, the first and last incidents happened at the same point on the same road.  Where two lanes merge into one.  The main road, it just so happens, that I take to work every morning.  A recipe certain to bring out the road warrior in any one of us.

Now I am pretty positive there is some other blogger, somewhere, tallying up the number of times he has been an undeserving recipient of misdirected anger while driving and I am the aggressor in his story.  I fully admit to being impatient with people who are not actually passing while driving in the fast lane.  I have two excuses; One, I am an embittered middle aged white male in America. And two, the left lane is for passing.  I know what you are thinking, but I deny it.  Okay, in one of the five above mentioned scenes I perhaps did egg on my antagonist.  The driver of the pickup truck was obviously trying to beat me to merge into the one lane and I might have, perhaps, subconsciously, accelerated a tad.  He of course gunned it and barely swerved in to beat me into the lane.  He flipped me the bird in his rear view mirror, and you can guess my faux pas.  I flipped it back.  He then proceeded to cut off onto the shoulder so he could get behind me enabling him to tailgate and harass me from behind.  Long story short, the incident ended with me begging their forgiveness for flipping them the bird and my pleading with these two goons to not get beat up in the parking lot where they had followed me.  True story.

As I mentioned previously the latest incident happened at this very same point in the road.  This time I was in the left lane and I admittedly was speeding.  Fifty-five in a forty-five zone.  So I could not understand why the driver behind me was tail gating just to hurry to the next red light.  This is a county road with retail and some residences by the way.  It is not like I was going slow in the fast lane.  There were a lot of cars so she could not pass me on the right.  Well, right before the merge into one lane, a space opened on the right and she swerved around, into the shoulder (the lanes have merged at this point) and then she cut me off so narrowly, I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting her.  She then proceeded to tail gate the car in front of me.  At this point I assumed the driver is either someone under the age of twenty-five, or a middle aged male even more angry than me, so I am not too disquieted by the behavior.  We of course all meet up at the next light and as I pull up next to the car (it was in the left turn lane) I realize the road rager is a nicely dressed middle aged woman.  Not believing a woman would pose a physical threat to me I rolled down my window and yelled that she almost caused a serious accident.  She blankly stared at me and looked away.  Then as the light turned green she honked her horn to get my attention and as she is turning left she flips me the bird.  A middle aged woman.  And she is the one who recklessly and purposefully cut me off.

Am I chauvinistic to be shocked that women, not young girls, are more aggressive on the road than me?  Or that they would take a chance and rage against a man who could be more malevolent than them?  Perhaps when they see I am so short that my head barely rises above the steering wheel they figure they can "take me".
I don't know.  In one of the other incidents, the mini van mom was practically foaming at the mouth while she yelled at me at a red light.  My infraction in this incident?  Pulling into a lane of traffic in front of her on a very busy road in the commercial district of Mt Laurel NJ.  I swear she was at least 500 feet back and that is about all the room any one will ever have to pull onto state route 73 in this neighborhood, believe you me.  And when I say fuming I mean apoplectic.  I could only imagine that her kid must have been knocked unconscious during a soccer practice miscue and she was rushing to be by his side.  Either that or her crock pot was boiling over at home.  And don't be skeptical.  I was totally innocent in that pageant of bilious fury.

I like to believe that if I am the aggressor and someone were to confront me at the next red light, that I would not take a combative stance in return.  And in fact I once was confronted for aggressive driving but it was not at the red light.  One morning, in a rush to get to work, I aggressively passed a slow driver on his right (there was a lane) to get ahead when the lanes merged into one.  Later that morning when I walked into the operatory to greet my 8:00 AM patient he turned to me and said "were you that crazy driver that sped by me at the light on Ganttown Rd?"  I sheepishly replied that "yes, it was me" and his only admonishment was "Please, be cool with that needle."