Poor tom's almanac - Traffic Jams Jar My Senses

By Tom Vartabedian

"The Armenian Weekly", Volume 74, No. 32, August 16, 2007

Traffic!

In a word, it’s been dreadful lately.

If I were to list a pet peeve, it would be stopped dead in a traffic jam with time being essential. I truly cannot stand parking lots on a freeway. I’ve been caught up in my share.

I could think of other places I would rather be spending the moment than smoldering in someone else’s fumes.

There was the time I attended an outdoor concert and didn’t get out of the parking lot until two hours later.

It was so bad, people were at the barbecue and having a jolly good time while the rest of us roasted behind the wheel. Too bad I couldn’t join them.

Oh, I had fair warning from my constituents. “Don’t plan on making a hasty get-away,” they told me, “not unless you have a helicopter.”

Well, how do you pass the time? You can’t read because it’s dark, nor can you admire the scenery. Complaining is senseless because it won’t get you out any faster.

I signaled to a nearby motorist, who rolled down his car window and asked, “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing,” I answered back, “but since we’re not going anywhere, let’s talk.”

So we spent the next 30 minutes discussing the concert and talking about our love for music. Had she been 60-ish and I single, this could have been a romance made in traffic.

I wrote a story once of a medic who delivered a baby in a traffic jam.

And if you’re a mathematician , you might come up with this equation. The number of blasts that come from auto horns in a traffic jam is equal to the sum of the squares at the wheel.

The biggest horror show came some years ago after parking my car in an underground garage adjacent to the hotel.

Nobody moved for an hour. People were so enraged after being stuck, they vented their frustration on one another. I saw two people actually come to blows when one party cut another off. Neither one was going anywhere soon.

It dampened a rather exhilarating evening in which people showed up to dance and the last thing on anybody’s mind was to be entombed in a parking garage.
A buddy of mine installed a siren in his car and put it to the supreme test during one commute when traffic raged out of control.

Cars got out of his path quickly and he had clear sailing of the highway.

All things considered, I was always thankful of having a job close to home without having to be confronted with Boston traffic. Three years of that nonsense was enough to make me street-wise.

I can’t understand for the life of me how people can make this a daily routine when there are other alternatives.

I was spending 16 hours a day on the road. That was equivalent to two working days with no compensation other than wrinkles and gray hairs.

I caused one of the biggest traffic jams you ever saw when my radiator boiled over right in the middle of a busy intersection.

It was embarrassing to say the least. Angered motorists passed by and shouted obscenities at me, as if to think it was my fault.

But the coup de grace was this. Not one soul stopped to help. There wasn’t one Samaritan in this noonday crowd who at least could have given me moral support.

Finally, the police showed up—and they were just as obnoxious.

“Hey, mister, you got to get this vehicle off the road,” they said. “It’s gumming up the works.”

“That’s your job officer,” I replied, “not mine. I didn’t ask for this.”

They finally called a tow truck and hauled my car away. I walked to the nearest train station and used a secondary form of transportation.

Let me tell you. It felt so good to have somebody else do the driving.

I recommend putting shuffleboard courts off to the sides of traffic-congested roads to give stalled motorists a recreational outlet, maybe even a coffee stand.

Remember when we were kids? We wanted to be pilots so we could be in the Air Force. Or fly an airliner from coast to coast. Now kids want to be control pilots so they can talk about traffic high in the sky.

It’s pretty great, sitting in your car listening to them say, “Traffic is light and moving freely”—and you haven’t had your foot off the brake for 15 minutes. For him, up at 1,800 feet, it’s moving freely. For you, it’s nothing but a gigantic parking lot.

The way I see it, I don’t want some big-mouth in a helicopter telling me I’m going to be delayed by a half hour due to a stalled truck in the outside lane. Let me find out for myself.

The only real solution to getting around in city traffic, as I see it, is to follow the ambulance.