MacGougan at Large

Notes on Cars - 3

Jekyll or Hyde?

It’s my experience that many people have two personalities. You think you know the people in your life, but often you only know their normal, walking-around persona. You don’t know the full range of their personality until you’ve been in a car they were driving. 

Normal, walking-around Mrs. X is a charming woman, a dear and sweet lady. She has a friendly word for anyone and maneuvers herself to be last in line at the potluck supper. There is, however, another side to her - a Fast and Furious Mrs. X - who appears out of nowhere whenever her hands make contact with a steering wheel. 

As the glint of a full moon is to a werewolf, so the touch of that steering wheel is to Mrs. X. Now, she’s in a hurry. Now, she’s compelled to speak aloud her wrathful judgments on her fellow drivers - their incompetence, their ignorance of traffic rules, their rashness when cutting in front of her, their rudeness when slowing her down, perhaps even straying to more general epithets regarding their physical makeup and parentage.

Everybody doesn’t get stressed out and behave in uncharacteristic ways when driving, but a surprising number of people do. 

Most of us like to think of ourselves as calm, rational people, but it’s easy to be calm and rational when you’re sitting at your kitchen table doing a Wordle. The better test, the stress test, is this: Can we be calm and rational while driving in a world of imperfect drivers?

(I could have used a stronger word than “imperfect”, but I’m modeling calmness and rationality here.)