Archive for August, 2013

Miscellaneous Musings: How to Cross the Street Without Giving Me the Urge to Run You Over

Posted on August 23, 2013. Filed under: Miscellaneous Musings |

Hello, gentle readers.  You may have noticed that I was on a long hiatus. Fortunately, it was a productive hiatus. Since I last updated you on the Mann-Spider War, I have:

Killed 14 spiders – mostly with chemical weapons, but occasionally with blunt force trauma.

Beat “We Don’t Go to Ravenholm” in Half Life 2 (I did a lot more in Half Life 2; this was just what was taking me awhile because I couldn’t find a switch for about three months)

Got 85% through Tomb Raider 2013.

Graduated from college with a degree in biochemistry and minors in chemistry and computer science.

Got accepted to a Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Ph.D. program.

Found a swanky apartment to live in while attending said Ph.D. program. An apartment with many, many, many perks.

Killed a spider in said apartment.

As you can see, I’ve been busy.
But tonight I had an incident that gave me pause. And in that pause I thought “Hey, it’s time the world learned how to do this properly.” So, without further adieu, I present my guide on How to Cross the Street Without Giving Me the Urge to Run You Over.

I. Pedestrian Crossings

If you are a pedestrian, you don’t want to get hit by a car. They’re heavier than you, you see, and generally speaking they move pretty fast. Heavy + fast = large momentum = SPLAT. And then you have to mess with hospitals and insurance, or alternatively, your loved ones/people-who-would-show-up-to-your-funeral-to-make-sure-you’re-dead have to deal with mortuaries and life insurance. The moral of this story is that it’s a mess. Don’t get hit by a car.

Here are some good rules of thumb to avoid this eventuality:

1) Do not saunter across the road. Walk briskly. You don’t have to sprint (and probably shouldn’t because if you trip and fall the motorists will be irritated), but neither should you proceed to look directly at me and slow down in the cross walk with your hands in your pockets and your pant line at mid-waist. Someday, when I rule the world, you will do this, and I will accelerate.

2) Use crosswalks. Don’t be that jerk who jaywalks. “But Fearless Leader,” you might ask. “What about those times when traffic is light and the crosswalk is 50 feet away from me?” SUCK IT UP. Avoid giving the paraplegics of the world the middle finger and use your completely functional legs to walk to the flipping crosswalk. I don’t care if there’s no traffic. There could be traffic in fifteen seconds, in which case they have to be paying attention during the time period that you’re sauntering across the road.

3) Look both ways before you cross the street. Any street. Bike path. Whatever. Just take two fricking seconds to ascertain whether or not a gigantic metal  death machine will be attempting to occupy the same space as you if you step off the curb. SUCK IT UP. Avoid giving the quadriplegics of the world the middle finger and use your completely functional neck to turn your head left and right. I don’t care if you think there’s no traffic. There could be traffic in fifteen seconds, in which case they have to be paying attention during the time period that you’re sauntering across the road outside of a crosswalk.

II. Bicycle Crossings

1) Don’t ride a bike. And if you do go ahead and ride a bike, understand that by doing so you agree to allow every motorist to hate your living guts. And possibly your dead ones, too, if you do stupid stuff. This is because bicyclists routinely do stupid things, like take up an entire lane on a single lane road, wear dark clothing and no reflectors at night, and ride their bicycles out in the middle of traffic without any warning. So every single time a motorist sees you on a bike, they assume that you’re going to do something stupid, and the get anxious waiting for you to do that stupid thing. This leads to hypertension, and nobody likes hypertension.

2) For the love of Godtopus, get off of your bike and walk it across the street. This makes motorists happier, because now you move as slowly as a pedestrian. And while pedestrians do stupid things too, it takes them longer to do those stupid things than it would if they were on a bicycle, so motorists are happier. Not happy, but happier.

4) I realize that cars are supposed to yield to pedestrians and bicycles in crosswalks. That’s fine. But as a cyclist, you need to understand that if I’ve just watched the two cars in front of me turn left, while I have the green arrow, then I’m going to naturally assume that there isn’t anything to impede my left turn.

The red beam is my field of vision. You will note that amongst my many superpowers, which include traveling forward in time by sitting in my bed eating crackers while playing Half Life, I do not, in fact, possess x-ray vision. Please be aware that there is a slight chance that this drawing is not to scale.

So if you, oh, I don’t know, start crossing the street while the gray car in front of me finishes turning, whist I’m following said car into the turn, without checking to see if there’s a car in back of the gray car, without the walk sign, then I don’t think that you a) get to yell at me to slow down when I’m not even doing the speed limit, especially since I didn’t even get more than a few feet into the turn before I stopped in an effort to not aid Darwinism, b) call me a punk, especially since I was dressed nicely, and c) act like that whole thing was my fault. Yeah, I get that you were freaked out because you dove into the crosswalk without looking both ways and then saw several thousand pounds of metal death machine creeping towards you and the child that you were pulling behind you. But guess what? It’s not my fault. If I had hit you, it would not have been my fault. I’m sure I would have been blamed, because dead small children with dead parents tend to instill a need to blame whoever is still standing, but it would not have been my fault. So thank your lucky stars that I was paying attention, because you sure as heck weren’t, and while I would feel bad about your dead kid, I really wouldn’t feel all that bad about you. Because yes, when you called me names and yell at me for your own jackassery, I tend to have the urge to run you over. So don’t do that.