The Road Warrior
A little background… I got my first driver’s license in California, shortly before my 17th birthday. I drove a beautiful little ’69 Mustang fastback, who was my true first love. But I drove her around a little far-outlying suburb of San Francisco, rarely even went on the highway. A year later, I moved to Texas for college, and really never went back. More to the point, moved to Houston.
Those of you who have ever been to Houston know what I discovered at that point – no matter what conventional wisdom says about the horrible traffic in San Francisco, Los Angeles, NYC, or any other major metropolitan area, Houston has the worst traffic, and the most frightening drivers, of anywhere in the U.S. And I am most assuredly one of them. It’s a matter of survival.
Several years ago, when I was finishing my undergrad, things were a little busy for a while. My two older girls were still preschool age. I had school full time, two part-time jobs, an internship, and various extracurriculars that were part of my certificate program. I lived in a suburb of Houston that was about an hour away in rush-hour traffic, and one of my jobs was there, but school, my other job, and my internship were all in the city. I was literally on the road for 2-4 hours every weekday. One of my teachers was a grad student, and he and a colleague were doing a study for one of their classes. He invited us all to participate for extra credit. It was a study on road rage, and it consisted of monitoring yourself for ten days. Each time you experienced road rage you were supposed to fill out one of the papers, indicating various things such as time of day, traffic conditions, whether you were late to where you were going, how angry you were on a scale of 1-10, how long you remained angry, etc. At the end of 10 days, we were to bring in our little log sheets. Walking into class on the day we were to turn them in, most of my classmates who were participating had a stack of 10-15 sheets.
My stack was literally an inch thick.
The teacher looked at me and said, “I just have two questions for you. Which lot do you park in, and what times are you coming and going from campus?” I laughed and explained to him how much time I spent driving in an average day. He smiled, said he understood… and then repeated his questions. He didn’t want to be anywhere near me when I was on the road!!!
Those of you who have ever been to Houston know what I discovered at that point – no matter what conventional wisdom says about the horrible traffic in San Francisco, Los Angeles, NYC, or any other major metropolitan area, Houston has the worst traffic, and the most frightening drivers, of anywhere in the U.S. And I am most assuredly one of them. It’s a matter of survival.
Several years ago, when I was finishing my undergrad, things were a little busy for a while. My two older girls were still preschool age. I had school full time, two part-time jobs, an internship, and various extracurriculars that were part of my certificate program. I lived in a suburb of Houston that was about an hour away in rush-hour traffic, and one of my jobs was there, but school, my other job, and my internship were all in the city. I was literally on the road for 2-4 hours every weekday. One of my teachers was a grad student, and he and a colleague were doing a study for one of their classes. He invited us all to participate for extra credit. It was a study on road rage, and it consisted of monitoring yourself for ten days. Each time you experienced road rage you were supposed to fill out one of the papers, indicating various things such as time of day, traffic conditions, whether you were late to where you were going, how angry you were on a scale of 1-10, how long you remained angry, etc. At the end of 10 days, we were to bring in our little log sheets. Walking into class on the day we were to turn them in, most of my classmates who were participating had a stack of 10-15 sheets.
My stack was literally an inch thick.
The teacher looked at me and said, “I just have two questions for you. Which lot do you park in, and what times are you coming and going from campus?” I laughed and explained to him how much time I spent driving in an average day. He smiled, said he understood… and then repeated his questions. He didn’t want to be anywhere near me when I was on the road!!!
posted by SaraSmile | 6:33 AM
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