The phone is a useful tool
that I’d love to use as a hammer on some people.
Back here, a couple days? weeks? ago, Tam talks about trucks and cellphones. And the morons who use them
Now, a commenter took her to task for hating on trucks- and I didn’t get that feeling at all. I think she was talking about people, and i know the people she was talking about.
Me, I’m not one of them. I know, I’ve talked before about talking while driving- I use a headset. If you can’t have a conversation while you drive, and still pay attention to the road, you had better take the rest fo the seats out of your car; a conversation via headset is no different than a conversation with an occupant of the car.
No, dialing the phone, and holding the phone to your head, are the things that give you tunnelvision.
Or text messaging. Or getting your email.
Both of which I do.
Let me back up. See, my commute is through the nastiest expressways on earth. Oh, people whine about Miami, and California, and all other areas of the US, but for sheer soul crunching life sucking madness, you have to have the combination of stone moronic drivers, ongoing road construction, horribly mismarked and poorly designed roads, and miserable four season weather of the Chicagoland area. Nuff said.
So for three plus hours a day, I sit in this traffic.
Sit being the operative word.
While I’m driving, I will take a call. I’m already plugged in, and a phone call helps kill the miles. I rarely initiate a call. But when I’m stopped, which is a lot of the time, I will text message. Read email. Surf the web. As soon as traffic starts to move, I’m on it, and the phone goes on the seat next to me. But the Treo makes an hour that is horribly unproductive more productive. And it kills the time.
Texting, making calls, reading emails when you’re driving? well, on rare occasions when there’s NO traffic, on a perfectly flat and straight piece of road (rare) I might look at an email; but this is very rare.
Still, compared to MOST other drivers out there, I could write a symphony and practice juggling while I drove. And I’d still be better than most. But that’s not good enough, not for them, and not for me.
“but for sheer soul crunching life sucking madness, you have to have the combination of stone moronic drivers, ongoing road construction, horribly mismarked and poorly designed roads, and miserable four season weather of the Chicagoland area.”
You forgot the POTHOLES!!! They’re ESPECIALLY nice this year, don’tcha think?
Driving while on a cell phone has a different effect on me then most. I’ve actually had people hang up on me because I wasn’t paying attention to their conversation. :)
I can barely stay in a conversation while driving.
Lighting a cigarette or opening a beer is almost heavy lifting.
I don’t know how you do it, but I’m envious.
Either my wife or I have been in accidents because the person behind us was fiddling with the radio, getting a cigarette, lighting a cigarette, dealing with a child in the back seat or eating and didn’t notice that things in front of them were no longer as they were moments before. Wham!
I commuted into/out of San Francisco for a few years. You’ll see people doing virtually everything while “driving” in that kind of traffic. I’ve read paperback books (they fit amazingly well inside the steering wheel), emailed, used an electric razor, etc. I’ve seen other drivers changing their clothes, shaving with an actual razor blade and shaving cream, watching movies, reading the newspaper, playing games on the laptop, applying makeup, using a curling iron, trimming nose hairs, changing a baby’s diaper, and just about anything else you can imagine- and probably some that you just couldn’t imagine.
I’ve only been at fault for one accident in my over 30 years of driving. It was when the brake master cylinder decided to suddenly go belly up in the parking lot at our kid’s school. Before I could apply the parking brake I bumped into the car in front of me.