No tickets please

While driving in town, I saw a man in a minivan with his wife and 2 children waiting for a spot to park in a spot downtown where someone was leaving.  He just sat there patiently waiting, but then the person leaving the spot pulled out oddly, then enabled someone else coming the other way to cut across 2 lanes of traffic and park there first.

The spot stealer was an elderly couple and I don’t think that they stole the spot on purpose.  I really believe they were unaware of the person waiting, and through a fluke of timing and the odd way the person leaving left, they were able to steal the spot.

Now the man waiting for the spot was hot (as I would be too).  So he took off and ran a newly turned red light by squealing his tires around the intersection that was only a few yards away.

Through his anger-invoked folly, he just happened to tear (with tires  squealing) through the intersection turn as a police car happened to be in the opposite lane sitting 2 cars from the light!  I saw the police car and thought “oh crap”, as did the offending driver as he quickly pulled over knowing he was busted before the police car got a chance to move.

I know why the man did it, and I would have done it too if I were as young as he was.  When I turned my car down the street where the man got pulled over, I saw the police man writing the driver a ticket.  I felt bad for him as I could tell he was just a normal guy that got raked over the coals by bad timing and bad luck that day.

I’m pretty sure the police officer gave the man 2 tickets, one for driving through a red light, and another for reckless driving.  I’m sure it’s going to cost him well over $200 dollars.  Hopefully what he learned from his bad day is to keep his cool, because it can be costly, both financially and physically, especially with 2 small children in the car.

The kicker is that I would have done the same thing if the same events happened to me five years ago.

Have you learned to control your emotions in such scenarios?  I did, but it took me a long time to do so.

-MR

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