Angry minivan man

Have you ever had one of those days? You know the ones where you should have stayed in bed, read a book and taken two naps, one at 11 and another one at 3? Well, that day was yesterday for me. Even as I write this I'm shaking my head at the sequence of events. As one of my co-workers put it "man, you should go home, drink a six pack and don't leave the couch all night." I don't think he meant a six pack of diet sprite but that's what I did.
The morning started off a little hectic, as always. I had an important conference call at 11:00 with some customers from my biggest account, Boeing, and some R&D folk from our headquarters in Austin. The way our conference call system works, someone (in this case me) has to be the "moderator". That means they log into the call and once they are in everyone else can join. If the moderator gets disconnected, everyone gets dropped. So, when the time for the call came I was in my car driving to another appointment. I got logged in, got everyone introduced and mostly just listened to the two other parties chatting. About halfway through the call I made a left hand turn onto a road with two lanes in my direction. Except that the inside lane was blocked up ahead by some construction. I put on my signal, looked in the mirrors and noticed a light blue minivan trying to pass around me before I could get over. Now, if you’re a guy, you know what happens next right? You push on the gas. No one in a minivan is allowed to beat you in a merge for any reason. Even a guy in a minivan knows he has to yield the right of way simply because he's in a minivan. Don't get me wrong, I actually love minivans. But when I drive ours I know the rules and I drive like I'm driving a minivan, soft and gently. Of course every once in awhile there is an exception to this rule and it's usually pretty extreme. You've seen that guy who’s grumpy that he has to drive a minivan instead of that red Porsche he's always wanted and so he takes it out on the road and anyone on it. Well, this guy in the sky blue minivan must have been one of those guys. The more I sped up the faster he accelerated. Of course I'm running out of merge room here so I eventually have to put on the brakes and get over. But I'm not happy about it and the only way to let him know is by honking my horn really long (if you thought I was going to say "flip him the bird" you need some counseling). Honestly, I wish you could get a horn with variable loudness control. That way you could really let someone know how you are feeling. If you’re just a little irritated then you could honk softly. If your really mad, crank that baby up to 11 and let them know how you feel!
Somehow, my honking was unacceptable to angry minivan man and he decided that the only way for him to let me know how he felt was to get out of the car and come and talk to me. Except that talking is not really what he did. As he’s walking over I start thinking, “this is it, this is the situation I’ve imagined a million times when I’ve honked my horn, an opportunity to confront the offender. But I’m on a conference call with very important people. I’ll hang up, NO, I can’t, I’m the moderator and it’ll drop everyone.” By now pierced lip angry minivan man is at my window yelling something that I couldn’t really understand. At some point I had rolled my window down so I was getting a full verbal throttling. I looked down at my phone and noticed the MUTE button, pushed it and simply asked the guy why he didn’t let me over. I don’t remember what he said but he eventually got back in his car and drove off.

I must admit that in thinking back on the situation, I’m glad that it happened the way it did. If I hadn’t been on the phone, I would have gotten out of my car, a fight would have ensued and nothing but trouble would have come from it. I would have had to rip out his piercing, broken his nose and read him his minivan driving rights. Eventually the cops would be called and I’d spend the rest of the day dealing with the aftermath. The way it went down I get to leave with nothing on me but a good story to tell.

About two hours later I’m stopped at a stop light and a teenage girl who probably struggles with subtraction, rear ends my car.

I should have stayed in bed.