Antique & Classic Cars Blog

At the wheel of a classic burbling quietly at a traffic light on a warm Memorial Day, it’s easy to forget that some drivers are angry–or some angry people are driving.

I had been painting a friend’s fence in return for his building me a website and had to run out for another can of primer. Initially I was planning to turn left at the light, but something–perhaps the urge to be as American as possible on this holiday–inspired me to visit the McDonald’s drive-thru across the way for a Coke.

This is not my neighborhood and I thought I would need to go straight to enter McDonald’s but just before the light changed, I could see that I needed to go right and then left. There was an SUV at the opposite light across the street.

When the light turned green I pulled out and he pulled out. I went right and he went left, directly at me. I was able to avoid him–it was two lanes–but I shrugged at this apparent error on his part.

He exploded in colorful shouting, leaning out his passenger window and flailing one of his fingers at me. Amidst the wordblast I detected the phrase “signaled the other way.” I pulled into McDonald’s and he whipped into the next business and raced across its empty parking lot back toward me, with apparently violent intentions.

I pulled up to the drive-thru speaker and he didn’t appear. I realized then that my 40-year-old MG turn signal was winking away for a left turn, and I had turned right.

I had misled him at the intersection plain and simple. I was wrong, he was right.

I wonder, though, if he may have overreacted….

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 10:14 am and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.