[Jeff Higgins]

I can't believe what just happened to me this morning. As some of you know, I don't make it into the big city much, and have a real aversion to driving in one. This morning's experience just served to reafirm my distaste for big city traffic.

So here I was, in a strange town, not knowing my way around whatsoever. Trying to get downtown to drop off my brother-in-law at some meeting (he normally works from home and never commutes) so I could use his van for the day. He doesn't know his way around downtown all that well either.

So it starts the minute we try to get on the freeway. I don't know what it is with mid-westerners, but at least here in Seattle, they let you merge. Every time my blinker came on some ass hat stomped on his gas and closed the gap. I wound up driving down the shoulder for at least a block until I found some one with slow enough reactions to where I could poke in in front of them. Wow; every man for himself.

Turns out our exit is one of those inside (left) lane exits. So the adventure begins again; we have to merge accross several lanes of unfriendly traffic that is hell-bent on holding their lane position. We finally get into the second to last lane, and that is when it happened.

I put my blinker on and some ass hat behind us in a Grand Caravan floors it, and actually swerves onto the shoulder in his effort to get in front, and stay in front of me. There was simply no room for him, and the ***** head wound up taking the driver's side mirror right off of my brother -in-law's Astro conversion van. I couldn't believe it. I backed way, way off, assuming he was insane. Maybe even ready to shoot me. My brother-in-law took it better than I did, and just laughed it off like it happens every day. "Welcome to Milwaukee" was all he had to say.