Most of us have experienced road rage at some point or another. It could have come from within. It could have come from without.
I don’t turn into a raging mess when I’m behind the wheel. I’ll shout, but that’s about it. I have been on the receiving end, though. Here’s what happened one time.
We were pulling onto a highway via an onramp. The highway was reasonably crowded with other cars, so we exercised extra caution when merging. And I guess we didn’t merge quickly enough for the guy in the SUV behind us because he zoomed right up to our car’s bumper, tailgating like you wouldn’t believe.
After a while, he got tired of that, I suppose, and sped up to pass us and then merged right in front us, nearly scraping bumpers. Nettled, we moved over a lane to get away from him and be done with it.
No dice.
Instead, he swerved over to the passing lane in front of us to try and block us. What the hell, right? So we merged back over and he swerved to follow, almost swerving himself off the road in the attempt. Keep in mind that there are plenty of other cars around us at this point. He could have hit any of them.
A pocket of traffic opened up in the left lane and we changed again and rode the faster speeds to finally pass him. And just as we did, he rolled his window down. A face apoplectic with rage leered at us, teeth bared in a ferocious snarl. The wind was whipping his words away, but it was very clear that he wasn’t using the nice words in a nice inside volume. He reached out the window and made a gun symbol with his fingers and mimed shooting us.
To this day, I still don’t know what we did wrong. Maybe he just hated Audis.
Has something like this happened to anyone else? Have you witnessed something like this happening?