Diatribe: Stop lights have become the new waiting room

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Fewer environments are more sterile, depressing and quiet than the waiting room at a doctor’s office. No matter how nicely its furnished you’re still going to find a passel of long-expired magazines, a sliding glass panel where you can see at least three to four people working full time on billing and people speaking in hushed tones.

Nothing seems to move except maybe a few fish in the obligatory aquarium that have nothing to do and all day to do it in. You get the picture, dear reader; however, I have discovered another venue that easily gives a doctor’s waiting room a run for its misery: It’s called a stoplight.

Just what makes a stoplight competitive? It’s the nuts behind the wheels of the cars around you. In this case, it’s those inconsiderate, law-breaking folks who take the opportunity when stopped for a red light to jump onto their cell phones and send and receive text messages.

Talk about gall!

They’ll continue pecking away like some barnyard chicken until somebody behind them honks a horn, urging them to get out of the way because the light turned green a long time ago. No apology, no remorse, no nothing but hubris. The fact that only two cars managed to get through the green arrow because of them is lost on them.

Although most states have now made it illegal to text while operating a motor vehicle, these drivers have a singular mindset. It’s what’s the rush?

As I’ve often said about slowly responsive drivers, whether they’re texting or just sitting there clueless, I don’t know how long I have left in my life but I don’t want to waste any of it sitting behind them.

One of these days, when I’m not in such a hurry to beat the lines at the local Dairy Queen, I’m going to find an obvious texter, get behind him or her and see just how long it is before they notice the light has turned green (maybe four cycles). If all is right in the world, a burly guy on a Harley will beat the heck out of him.

Just an aside, I would think that even after being beaten, a true texter would send out another “tweet” saying he now has a reworked nose, has 50 percent fewer teeth to brush and one less testicle to worry about.

I’m as disgusted by the lack of clamp downs on text messaging as I am by the relative failure on the part of law enforcement to cite drivers who fail to use their turn signals (long a pet peeve of mine). Besides making the roads safer for the rest of the driving public, both would generate great amounts of much-needed revenue for communities.

There’s another element of society jeopardized by people texting and not paying attention to their driving: pedestrians. Let’s say that a driver, we’ll call him Jack, is sitting at a major intersection texting his buddy about a concert he’s just left. It’s black as coal outside because it’s after midnight. After what seems like a long time, even to Jack, he looks up and sees the light is green. However, unknown to this idiot it’s the third cycle and some poor homeless guy who waited through two lights because he feared getting hit while crossing the street finally figures nobody is paying attention so he’s safe to attempt the crossing.

Wrong! As Jack realizes the light is green he tosses his cell phone on the seat next to him and hits the gas just as this poor homeless guy is dead center of the grille of Jack’s car. The next thing this poor hobo knows is that he’s being serenaded by a quartet of harps in a brightly lit auditorium.

As Mr. Mackey, student counselor at South Park Elementary School would say, “Texting while driving is bad.” If you want to text and drive then make them consecutive, sort of like the long prison sentence you should receive if you cause bodily harm to someone because you’re lost in a cyber world.

Al Vinikour is a Midwest-based freelance auto writer. Proving a mind is a “terrible thing to use” he sometimes sits in traffic and ponders about things — generally auto-related — that make him mad. Believing the “pen is mightier than the sword” (and generally results in a whole lot less jail time), he vents his anger through a word processor and produces the Driver’s Side Diatribe column. E-mail him at vinikour@comcast.net.