{"id":2552,"date":"2010-01-11T19:22:40","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T19:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2552"},"modified":"2012-04-29T00:16:33","modified_gmt":"2012-04-28T23:16:33","slug":"discoveries-made-on-talking-to-my-fellow-motorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2552","title":{"rendered":"Discoveries made on talking to my fellow motorists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Some of them appear to be terminally stupid and twuntish<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Feeling more mellow than normal I decided to try and help a couple of my fellow motorists out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Helping The First:<\/strong><br \/>\nIt was 06.00 and pitch black. As I sat at the traffic lights on the edge of town, waiting for them to turn a less angry colour, a vehicle pulled up behind me.<\/p>\n<p>At first I thought my mirror was showing me a motorbike approaching, but when it pulled to a halt I could see it was a car.<\/p>\n<p>As the lights insisted on remaining red I quickly hopped out of the car and pointed to the nearside front lights. The driver wound his window down and shouted &#8216;Eh?&#8217; at me, having obviously lost the use of his legs in some war or other.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;You have no lights at all on the nearside, I thought you were a motorbike,&#8217; I said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Thanks!&#8217;, came the cheery response.<\/p>\n<p>I got in to my car, the lights changed and I drove off.<\/p>\n<p>Now what I expected to see in my rear-view mirror, was the car behind, pulling in to the side of the road, and the driver replacing at least one of his two faulty light-bulbs.<\/p>\n<p>No.<\/p>\n<p>Instead this total twat &#8211; albeit a cheerful one! &#8211; followed me all the way down the A40, around the top bit of Oxford, out the other side and even in to the Park and Ride car park.<\/p>\n<p>Let me put it this way.<\/p>\n<p>I had pointed out that his car was both dangerously defective and also highly illegal and his response was to ignore these points and continue on his way.<\/p>\n<p>Aaargh!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Helping The Second:<\/strong><br \/>\nMany hours later &#8211; and in the total dark of blackness once more &#8211; I was on the A40 exit road, waiting for the car in front of me to pull out on to the Witney\/Abingdon road.<\/p>\n<p>I waited.<\/p>\n<p>And I waited.<\/p>\n<p>And then, for good measure, I waited some more.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know precisely how long I waited, I was listening to a very interesting interview on Radio 4 about mining salt in the UK, so I wasn&#8217;t getting stressed or bursting a blood-vessel, but &#8211; and I kid you not &#8211; I was there for more than five minutes, but less than seven.<\/p>\n<p>And then the penny dropped. It struck me that the poor motorist in front might have broken down!<\/p>\n<p>I tottered up to his window and tapped on it, the elderly gentleman in the driver&#8217;s seat rolled the glass down.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Are you OK?&#8217;, I asked. &#8216;A few dozen gaps in the traffic have gone by and I wondered if you&#8217;d broken down?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Oh no,&#8217; said the nice old man behind the wheel. &#8216;We&#8217;re fine. It&#8217;s just that my eyes don&#8217;t see too well in the dark against moving lights, so we&#8217;re waiting for all of the traffic to go away before we pull out.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Stunned.<\/p>\n<p>I suggested &#8211; and in a nice way too I&#8217;ll have you know! &#8211; that it might be an idea if he had his eyes tested and took a new driving test.<\/p>\n<p>He laughed, &#8216;I don&#8217;t think so. I&#8217;d fail the eye test and fail the driving test too&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>Double stunned.<\/p>\n<p>I got back in to my car and pulled around him. For all I know he&#8217;s still sitting there waiting for all the traffic to go away.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve taken his registration number and I&#8217;ll call the police tomorrow but I know full well that nothing will get done &#8211; after all, the police can&#8217;t rock up and demand he takes an eye test and force him to take a new driving test.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s one for the politicians.<\/p>\n<p>You want to do something that&#8217;s *really bloody useful?*<\/p>\n<p>Change the driving law to stop both of these types of incidents from happening.<\/p>\n<p>Simple, eh?<\/p>\n<p>Too simple, maybe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of them appear to be terminally stupid and twuntish Feeling more mellow than normal I decided to try and help a couple of my<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}