Rage After the Storm

Okay. No politics. No news. No links. Not a single luxury. Today, I just want to write about something that happened last Friday that really pissed me off.

There was a huge storm in the area. I'm talking HUGE! I was at work, but was watching with great interest through my office window, which has a view to the north. It was awesome! The sky was so dark, it almost looked like we were having a solar eclipse. The rain was coming down, not in buckets, but in lakes. There were lots of super lightning bolts. I just love watching thunderstorms. They are probably my favourite of the natural phenomena. They're very sexy too.

Of course, after the storm passes you get back to reality and understand that there might be consequences. Parts of town were blacked out. Trees were down in many areas. My boss's private golf club was severely damaged by storm for the second time this year, and will likely not re-open this year. A number of basements were flooded. And then there's the traffic.

Anybody driving in Toronto knows that whenever there's a little bit of rain, traffic slows to a crawl. I've never really understood this, but it's as predictable as the Leafs wilting in the spring. So when you get a whole lot of rain, you might as well bring a Tolstoy novel with you in your car. I'm lucky enough to live only a ten minute drive from work (in normal conditions), and I don't need to take a major highway. But I do drive up the Bayview extension, a good alternative to the Don Valley Parkway which was looking more like a tailgate party on Friday. To my surprise, the volume on Bayview wasn't that bad at all at the beginning. But the rain had left a massive lake in the road, so the two lanes merged into one to bypass it, and then traffic was joined by the people who decided to get off the DVP before they started to decompose. So it was a bit of a crawl after that, but not too bad. Then, after passing Pottery Rd. and getting to the most steep and winding stretch, I heard a siren. A fire engine had to get by. Cars were jammed like sardines in two lanes, with a median to the left and a ditch to the right, no shoulder. So those of us in the left lane had to somehow squeeze over the the right well enough to let the fire engine go by. Amazingly, we were able to do so, but the row of cars in the right lane looked like a disjointed mess.

And then came the thing that pissed me off.

After the fire engine passed, the cars that followed it just zipped right on behind it! Here the rest of us cars were packed together in the right lane, misaligned and looking a bit like the marching band scene in Animal House. And the people coming from behind us in the left lane, seeing this carnage, didn't let anyone in ahead of them. I think that was obnoxiously rude. It then took several minutes for us to straighten ourselves out and get back on our way.

Maybe this story didn't have a great payoff, but I just needed to vent. You can let me know if I'm out of line for thinking that the following drivers should have let the displaced cars merge with them. This was the closest I've ever come to experiencing true road rage. Fortunately I wasn't in a position to do anything about it.