Recently, I was in a small car accident. Luckily it was minor, and I wasn’t scared, nor did I burst into tears. But it did have me grabbing my hair as I knew another round of fresh grey hair was coming up. Upon the first sight of grey hair, many years ago, I actually thought it was because of the kids and how they can really get under my skin and drive me crazy. Then I figured it was a result of not having a job, and I blamed my husband for us moving to another country and allowing myself to have been thrown into a 50s kind of situation in which only the petticoat was missing: a stay-at home mum, making sure that the children are bathed and fed, and having the pot roast and mashed potatoes just ready by the time my husband gets home. Finally, I blamed it on bad genes. But no, it wasn’t even that. What made my lovely dark brown hair turn grey, and I mean coo-coo pigeon grey, is traffic. And specifically driving a car in Luxembourg.
Why? Well, first of all, when we moved to Luxembourg 11 years ago, the roads were not as busy as they are now. Luxembourg has the highest rate of cars per inhabitants worldwide, 676 per 1000 inhabitants to be exact. That means that with a population growth of 200,000 in 11 years, we have 135,000 extra cars on the road, in our teeny tiny country. Add to that that Luxembourg is probably the biggest construction site of Europe and that there is always some road closed off for traffic and you have a double whammy of reasons why the roads here are so bleeping full.
But that is acceptable and okay-ish because most of the traffic jams take place in the morning and in the evening so if you are flexible in your hours, you can time your car-related activities around rush hour. But then there are other challenges to keep my head cool and my hair brown: whenever I am on the road, there are people in front of me that, for no particular reason at all seem to find it necessary to drive 30 where the speed limit is 50. Why?
Why drive so slowly when you are allowed almost twice as fast? I will look ahead of the car in front of me, you know, as you do to anticipate. And often there are no roadblocks ahead, no other traffic, in short, no apparent reason why someone would drive only 30. Why not keep to the maximum speed? It drives me insane! I know that some people will question my anger. They’ll probably state that life is too short to get worked up over these little things. Maybe, yes. BUT! Life is short. I may be an optimist and quite sure that I will still live tomorrow and have a few years ahead of me. But am I 100% sure? No! Therefore, spending unnecessary time in a car behind someone who is I don’t know, putting on their make-up, or afraid to drive the maximum speed limit, or just doesn’t know where the gas pedal is, is a waste of time. It drives me insane! Result: grey hair.
If you are anything like me, you’ll also get worked up over drivers (how dare they even call themselves that) that do not indicate where they are headed. Pure grief! If you are at a crossing but you continue straight, it’s fine. Have a happy continuation. But if you do intend to change direction, be it to the left or right, please have the presence of mind, the driver’s logic and sheer politeness to put on your frigging indicator. There are many crossings in which I could have saved seconds, amounting to hours over the years, if I had known in which direction the idiot in front of me was headed. Grey hair, I am telling you!
Now, I am not saying that you should drive faster than is allowed. I have major issues with people that ignore 30 km/hour signs and continue to drive 50 or even more. Based on the above, one might think I am a fan of those people, but I am not. My credo is ‘be quick, but don’t break the rules, bleep face’. It’s dangerous and if I have someone like that behind me, tailgating me, I drive a little bit too slow, just to teach them a lesson. By the way, I have been accused of tailgating myself, but I would like to point out that there is a difference between tailgating and just moving along closely to make room for the people behind me.
And that’s what I was doing when I had the accident. You see, even though I recognise that I can be rather passionate about certain things, I am not an aggressive person. I am just an assertive driver. I decide quickly, I look ahead, I know what’s coming and I anticipate. In the case of the accident, I was behind a car that was driving very slowly, heading towards a traffic light. Now, if you are driving very close to a traffic light and it turns orange, it is perfectly acceptable to continue driving for about three seconds. I call that acceptable orange. In many cases it is too late to break and stop anyway. However, if you see the orange light longer than three seconds you should stop. It means you are at a long enough distance from the light to stop. This also means that if you break suddenly, during the phase of ‘acceptable orange’, you are a danger on the road. Why? Because someone behind you will be counting on you, anticipating if you will, to continue driving and hitting the breaks would then lead to an accident.
In the case of my little traffic incident, the driver in front of me didn’t slow down when he was close to the light. He wasn’t going very fast either, but I figured he would go with the ‘acceptable orange’ rule. However, he decided to stop anyway. Quite suddenly, may I add. As I had stayed close to him, you know, making room for people behind me, I couldn’t break in time and slightly bumped into him. And now the blame is on me. Because the blame is always on the person in the rear car which really isn’t fair considering the ‘acceptable orange’-rule and my talent for anticipation. So now I need yet another appointment with my hairdresser. To fight the new grey.
