[Another of my rant posts from my “column.”].]

I have a problem: I like to think that truckers don’t need to crawl up your back-side to get to their destinations more quickly. The problem is that they apparently do.

Nothing is more infuriating to me than to be cruising along at a suitably-speedy-yet-within-the-bounds-of-reason 70 MPH, zipping down the middle lane of the highway, only to see this huge honking grille in my rear-view mirror. Setting my annoyance aside for a moment, I check out my options. I’m keeping a safe distance between the car in front of me and my own, so nowhere to go there. Glancing to the right, there is a vehicle that might be attempting to achieve perfect symmetry with my own car, because they are right alongside me; no possible movement that direction. And to the left, there is a solid line of cars traveling along with barely room for a slice of bread between each one; if there’s a sudden stop, they’re toast. So I’ve basically got nowhere to go but where I am right now.

Now, I know that these 18-wheelers are prohibited from driving in the left lane, so the truck-driver’s choices are limited to the right lane and my own middle one. Regardless of this reality, however, traffic is thick enough to make my truck-driving friend’s dreams of the Autobahn just that: dreams. He’s not going anywhere fast; at least, he’s not going there any faster than the rest of us. In this situation, he’s simply got to accept that he’s not going to go any faster than the flow of traffic, right?

Obviously, you and I are not truck-drivers, because this guy is going to go faster than the rest of us, and his trail leads right through my compact Volvo wagon. [Could he but know it, he and his ilk are really the reason I opted for a new Volvo and its reputation for safety when I was buying this car; these truckers absolutely terrify me.] 

So there he is, seemingly centimeters off my back bumper. I’m pissed, my wife is nervous, and my 3-year-old son is, thankfully, oblivious. I’m cursing through my teeth so my child can’t hear me. [They’re sponges, I swear, and they choose the most inopportune moments to regurgitate your thoughtlessly-spewed epithets.] And now I’m wondering how in God’s name I ended up in a remake of Duel, complete with an insane truck driver and a hopelessly silly voice over. [No Dennis Weaver, though, so that’s cool.] 

And then–I don’t know why…perhaps the ‘crank’ wore off?–he backs off a few inches, and a space miraculously opens to my right. I slip into it, and the whole thing is over. And I watch the jerk pull up and do the same thing to the guy from which I was maintaining a safe distance a few moments before.

And what really grinds me is that, a minute or two later, there is a major slowdown; the middle lane slows to a crawl, and the Phantom Trucker ends up behind me once again! I can’t shake this guy! Would it kill him to give me 5 or even 10 feet of breathing room? Yeah, it probably would. Because then he wouldn’t get to wherever he’s going for another 15 seconds, and God knows what that would do to his numbers. Meanwhile, my kid is banging something on the window–his shoe, I think, and he’s yelling something about burying me–and I’m getting more and more tensed up, hoping that these air-bags for which Volvo is famous will work the way they have in every one of the 10 million crash-tests they’ve performed on them. Because I know this guy is going to clock me, and I just want to be able to survive the impact.



Because I’m going to beat the crap out of him.