Justifiable Road Rage

To become a flight attendant at Westjet, I think there is an intensive month long training period and you need to score very highly to pass. Once you have passed and become a flight attendant, you have to baby sit thousands and thousands of passengers every year. You spend a good part of the beginning of each flight talking about the safety features on the plane to which almost no one listens. You are responsible for their lives in an emergency.

 

To be an electrician it takes 9000 hours, or about five years. The work that they do enables all of us to have a high standard of living, if they do it correctly. If they make a mistake, people can die. If they make a mistake, they can die.

 

To be a plumber it will take you 9000 hours as well. Once again, thanks to plumbers we have a high standard of living. If they make a mistake, the property damage can be astronomical. If they make a mistake, we are all up shit creek.

 

To become a member of the RCMP there is a 24 week training course, which you can only take after completing high school, a first aid course, polygraph test, background check, physical abilities test and of course a difficult written exam. Lives depend on them doing their job correctly

To get your drivers license you need to read and understand a pamphlet, and answer 30 T/F questions about the information in that pamphlet. You can take the test as many times as is necessary to pass. Once you have passed the test, you presumably will learn to drive and when you feel that you are competent, you pay a small fee and take a ten to fifteen minute road test. You can take the test as many times as is necessary to pass. If you make a mistake, people will die. At the very least, people will get pissed off, make a mistake and other people will die.

 

Why is it so easy to get a license? Why are we tested once at the beginning of our driving career and never again? Shouldn’t we have to take a written and a road test every five years? I am pretty sure I have forgotten things that are important in forty-five years and learned some very bad habits in those same years. I might fail the test, but isn’t that better than causing someone’s death? Well, there are a few people I wouldn’t mind seeing dead, but death by automobile accident is very unreliable.

There were these two drivers that were ahead of me that really got my goat today. Driving 45 in a 60 zone just isn’t right. I don’t mind if they choose to drive slowly, but why do they have to do it side by side? I’m sure they don’t even know they were pissing me off, in spite of the fingers raised in their direction, the foul language that turned the air in my car blue and the stink eye that I sent in their direction.

 

Maybe I should calm down when I am driving. Maybe I should take some kind of driver’s meditation course. Maybe I should move to Texas where I could carry a gun and the laws make allowances for justifiable road rage. Maybe…