Road Rage Rears Its Ugly Head

A weird thing happened to me yesterday evening -- I was almost involved in an act of road rage.  No, a crazed motorist didn't come over and bang on my window and flip me off;  I'm sorry to say that I was on the verge of becoming the crazed motorist. 

I went downtown after work, and instead of taking my usual downtown route on I-64 that runs somewhat parallel to the river, I drove through the hood and decided to go up 2nd Street into downtown.  In retrospect, this was an idiotic thing to do in rush hour traffic.  I was going to Market Street, and I-64 would have taken me right to Market.  But I had 15 minutes to kill before time to meet a friend so I thought it wouldn't hurt to take the long way.  Boy was I naive.  To sum all of this up and get on with the good part of the story, let me say that it took me 40 minutes to travel 5 blocks on 2nd Street.  Traffic moves faster than that out of downtown after Thunder Over Louisville.  After inching my way within one block of where I would turn onto Market and repeatedly pounding on the steering wheel and yelling "WTF?" I saw what the problem was.  No, it wasn't a wreck nor a stalled car.  The massive traffic jam was caused by inconsiderate drivers stopped in the intersection. 

When the cars travelling west bound on Jefferson Street would get to the intersection of Jefferson and 2nd, instead of doing the considerate thing like waiting till they could have room enough to pull through the intersection and leave 2nd Street free for those travelling on 2nd, they would go out into the middle of the intersection in their line of traffic, and then be stuck.  So when our light on 2nd Street would change, we couldn't move because they were blocking us.  I made it to the front of the line of traffic, and sat through 4 light changes before the idiots on Jefferson would move on through so I could go.  I watched one lady in particular.  The light for Jefferson had just turned yellow as traffic moved on through, so I thought "finally, we can get through." But the lady in the white car gunned it and came on through, and blocked the intersection once again for all of us on 2nd Street.  I actually had my hand on the door of the Blazer, almost ready to get out and run over to her car and beat on her window, but I thought that since she probably works in downtown, she might have been packing.  So I kept on glaring at her, just a few feet away from me, and when she was looking in my direction, I flipped her off.  It felt good.