DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour   

Just about the time I think my discovery of new things to complain about is coming to an end something will happen that I know will give my readers hope for my future. The most recent one occurred this past week. I was going to the bank to deposit a meager check and pulled behind someone at the drive-up window who looked like she was retrieving items from the tube that goes “whoosh.” I thought this was great because I was in a hurry and figured I’d get waited on rather quickly.

However, I waited and waited and waited for the car in front me to pull up. After what seemed like several minutes, I thought that the person probably wasn’t done with her transaction and was waiting for the teller to finalize it. Realistically several minutes went by and then she pulled out.

The entire time she was in front of me — probably five minutes — she was tending to other matters and held me and the three people behind me hostage. What an inconsiderate female dog! Is there a reason she couldn’t have pulled forward and parked her car in the bank’s lot if she had things to do than to not give two hoots in Hell who was paying the penalty of waiting for her to finish her business on her own sweet time?

Apparently our time doesn’t contribute to the overall scheme of things

As impatient as I am I would normally give the person a blast of my horn to wake them up, scare them or at best, tick them off. But in this case I thought the person wasn’t done yet so I technically had no right to try to hurry the process along.

I was praying to the ghost of my late-Uncle Barney that when this woman pulled out on the main street she got T-boned by a twin-screw Mack semi and was so mangled that as her car exploded into 1,845,615 pieces, making it possible to identify the body or the make, model and certificate of ownership of the vehicle itself. I was basically hoping that her vehicle and she became one in the experience known as vaporization.

I was still seething when on the way home I decided to stop at my local Dunkin’ Donuts and get my wife and I each a large coffee. It was raining pretty hard so I went to Plan B, which was to use the drive-up window.

A former security guard at Chernobyl could guess what was going to happen next to me. As I pulled around the building a vehicle in front of me pulled up to the speaker and menu sign. It must have been this person’s first visit to the wonders of a drive-up window or at least a donut shop because he was there the better part of five minutes before ordering his coffee and cruller (it figures that his order involved something French, isn’t it?).

Then he pulled up to the pick-up window. I go there so often that when Mohammed or Faisal or whatever his name is knows what I want and I don’t have say anything other than exchange a few pleasantries and be on my way.

Unfortunately, this human proctology experiment after reaching the pick-up window started counting through his change or food stamps or whatever he had in his pockets, and then spent more time putting his order on the seat next to him (probably arranging it “just so”), counting and pocketing his change and then peeling out of the space like he was a snail on fire. I had serious doubts that my coffee would still be hot by the time I was handed it.

You’re probably all dying of curiosity as to what I hoped would befall that guy. Here it is: I prayed to the spirits of my dead 21-pound cat, Omar, that as that as he was driving by the gas pumps on his way out to the main road a spark caused by flatulence from a ground hog that hangs around the station blows it up and takes this guy on a nonstop journey past Uranus.

Just where and how were these people raised that makes them so oblivious to other life on Earth? These are the same people you encounter when you’re trying to pull out of a store parking lot and traffic is backed up to Mars. You’re too polite to nose forward to try and force your way onto the road but you hope against hope that you’ll make eye contact with a driver who will be kind enough to give you the courtesy to pull out in front of him — especially since he won’t make the intersection for another 3-4 lights.

But noooooooo!!! Why should the person give you some help when he can inch forward towards the bumper of the vehicle in front of him so that a gnat couldn’t fit between? And/or, he’ll have a conversation with someone and act like he didn’t notice a vehicle trying to use this opportunity to safely pull out in front of him. The ridiculous thing is that often these conversations take place when the driver is the only one in the car!

Good Lord; I hate people more than I hate life itself!!! No matter what kind of Hell I wind up with for eternity it has to have more considerate inhabitants that this place does. At least there’s something to look forward to in the afterlife.