it'll make a great diving reef
I don't know what it's like everywhere else, but here in Portland we've got a serious problem with assholes in SUVs who are almost invariably talking on cellphones. We live in a city split in half by a river that is a shipping lane, so the (too few) bridges that we have here are all designed to raise up when a ship needs to pass. The mechanics of this dictate that on most bridges there are little sections of metal grating where the joint is, maybe 3 meters of rainslick steel.
Driving anywhere requires paying attention. Driving on slick surfaces in a vehicle with a high center of balance and substantially more mass than other vehicles should make drivers even more mindful, but in practice SUV drivers seem to pay less attention to the road than other drivers do. I've spent *way* too much time dodging these idiots. So hearing that Melissa Borgaard (licensed cellphone-using SUV-driving fucktard) drove her shitmobile off the Morrison Bridge (an 18 meter drop to the water, and then another 17 meters to the bottom) actually gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
It's just too bad there was no lemming factor... it would have been great if a chain of people too busy talking on the phone to pay attention to anything but the back of the vehicle in front of them had followed the leader over the edge.
Driving anywhere requires paying attention. Driving on slick surfaces in a vehicle with a high center of balance and substantially more mass than other vehicles should make drivers even more mindful, but in practice SUV drivers seem to pay less attention to the road than other drivers do. I've spent *way* too much time dodging these idiots. So hearing that Melissa Borgaard (licensed cellphone-using SUV-driving fucktard) drove her shitmobile off the Morrison Bridge (an 18 meter drop to the water, and then another 17 meters to the bottom) actually gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
It's just too bad there was no lemming factor... it would have been great if a chain of people too busy talking on the phone to pay attention to anything but the back of the vehicle in front of them had followed the leader over the edge.
4 Comments:
And calling them rude names is the only nonviolent response I can think of to counter their rude driving. Their rudeness harms other people while destroying the environment... mine merely upsets the occasional anonymous commenter. I don't have any problem with my position on this issue.
Yeah, I caught the 'hands free' bit the first time around. And you are right, it would have been no different than if she were talking to the person next to her or singing along with the radio or doing any other activity that drivers do instead of paying attention to their driving. 'Hands free' doesn't mean 'brain free'... she didn't go off the bridge for lack of hands on the wheel, but it's very likely that she did go off for lack of attention to the road.
Road conditions? I've seen the place she went over; there are two road conditions that seem relevant. First, the road is a bridge, so it is up in the air. Had she merely swerved onto the shoulder of a land-based road, this would have been a non-event. Second, the road is in Oregon, so it is wet. Like all the other roads.
50,000 people cross that bridge every day, and decades go by without anyone going over the edge. Statistically speaking, if there were a problem specific to that stretch of bridge at least one of the other 365 million cars that have driven over the bridge in the last twenty years would have gone over as well.
(I am purposely ignoring the possibility of wormholes and space-time singularities, though; taking them into account you might actually have a case for the 'road conditions' theory, but I suspect that you'd have a hard time convincing the Oregon Department of Transportation to do anything about it.)
So yeah, your sister-in-law deserves some kind of prize. Be grateful it wasn't a Darwin Award.
With love and hopes for your family's health and happiness,
Foobario J. Ignorant Fucking Moron, Esquire
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