Eight months ago, I became one of the hundreds, thousands, millions of people we know as "commuters." After spending my entire adult life getting to work on foot or by subway, I now spend an hour and a half in a car two times a day.
Every morning, my husband and I travel, encapsulated in our vehicle with its personally appealing environment: just-right music, temperature, conversation; I've got my work spread out across my lap, little reading light on...and we speed along the highway alongside, in front of, and frustratingly behind the thousands of other encapsulated commuters. It is surreal. There we all are, sharing the road, cursing each other out along the way, thanking one another now and then for making the right move (GET OUT of my WAY!!) all the while avoiding eye contact at all cost. At times, we are courteous, and other times cut-throat.
Like being smashed up against people you don't know on the subway, driving on a highway puts you into close quarters with other people who have so much in common with you (aren't we all in this together?), but with whom you may never share even the slightest glance. Sure we admire and ridicule each other's cars and driving style--in fact the highway is a great place to "window shop" for a new car (notice how all the cars that catch your eye are from the same maker? Is that telling you something?), but I keep finding myself up against this question: How the...did half of these people get a driver's license?!
Case in point: the left lane. Also know as, "the fast lane," and, "the passing lane," this section of highway road has a specific designation and I don't doubt for one second that each and every one of us knows what that purpose is...yet, day after day, trip after trip, mile after mile, I come up behind drivers who are taking their merry sweet time and just "hangin'out" in the fast lane. Just driving along at the speed limit, plenty of room for them to pull over into the middle lane, taking up space, blocking the flow of traffic for those of us who like to step it up a notch. What's up with that, folks? I think one of three things is going on:
A: The driver has no license and therefore never learned the rules of the road
B: The driver is rebelling against the conventions of driving in America (generally forcing us faster drivers to pass in the right lane--the slow drivers' lane)
C: The driver likes to instigate road rage.
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