Right. I think that after I finish this post I'll probably have enough material to publish a small book on the things I don't like about the other people using the same public roads I do. Maybe I'll need to reserve a ISBN number, just in case ... As it happens I've been emailing to a good friend in The States about how sad our winters are nowadays. We hardly ever see any real snow around here anymore. So when it's finally there it's looking like that cozy looking white blanket for no more than fifteen minutes or so before melting to a grey mush and causing all kinds of problems. You can imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to see that very same white blanket covering the whole of my town. (Not actually my town of course, just the town I live in. I've got enough problems of my own so I don't need the burden of owning a whole town myself ;-) Because I could go and get my IFO back from the repair service I didn't need to get up that early. They open at eight so my alarm clock started making weird noises at around seven, which was more than early enough. But this meant that loads of people had messed up that white blanket before I saw it so I couldn't take that 'Happy Xmas, whish you were here' kind of photo out of my window. Better luck next time I guess. What I could do was dig out the replacement IFO because that thing was snowed in like you wouldn't believe. I think that it had a good two and a half inches of snow on it which for our standards is about half the stock for the entire winter ;-) And then, right after I cleaned the IFO and started it's engine, the misery started good. What is it with people, their cars and slowing down like crazy as soon as anything other than rays of sunlight fall from the sky. I mean come on, it's (usually) only water in whatever form and most people I encounter on my way to work (as in the ones before me of course) have major problems driving normally when they don't have dry asphalt under their tires. Even when it's 'just' raining people tend to slow down for reasons I can't understand. And I'm not minding people actually keeping to the speed limits because to each his own and just because I seem to be in a permanent state of hurrying it doesn't mean that other people need to move over and let me through. Would be nice if they did, but that's a different story. However what does get me pretty irritated is people driving seventy three kilometers an hour where there the speed limit is eighty. Or forty six where it's fifty. Things like that. Why do just these extra couple of kilometers an hour mean so much to these people that makes them impossible to maintain normal speed? Do their cars become highly unstable or uncontrollable? Are they afraid they can't brake in time anymore? What is it? For the love of me I can't figure out what could possibly the reason for not keeping to the speed limit. You know why there are so many road accidents when it's raining a bit more than usually or, like today, when it has just snowed a bit and the roads are wet? It's because people slow down, that's why. People must realize that when they slow down other people behind them need to slow down more. The one behind that one even more, and so on. I believe that we've now come to a time where during rush hour the roads are too crowded to have room for all this slowing down. When one part of the drivers just doesn't care it's raining and wants to keep on driving like they normally do and another part wants to play it extra safe and slow down a bit the result is a mess. Not necessarily accidents but there will be at least a longer traffic jam and yes, in worst case scenario, accidents will happen.