What goes around...

I have two-traffic related incidents to report upon from last week.

The first one happened when I was driving to work. On a relatively open stretch of urban road, I could see the blue lights in my mirror from a while back, so was keeping my eyes open as I knew that I would have to pull out of the way to let the ambulance past. When I did pull over, it was about 100 yards before a junction, the kind where people often pull out halfway to ease their way into the traffic. The numpty who was sitting halfway obviously saw me and the chap in front pull in and thought "Here's my chance". As it pulled into the road, the ambulance and pursuing police car had to brake (thankfully not too sharply), and gave him a blast of the horn.

Here is the best bit - the accident was only about 500 yards up the road, by a set of traffic lights. The ambulance pulled in, and was swiftly followed by the police car. A line of cars started to queue by the red light. A paramedic leapt out and attended to the casualty; the technician who was driving the ambulance then got out, spoke to the policeman, and pointed out the car which had pulled out in front of the ambulance.

It was very satisfying to see the copper give the driver a good old fashioned telling off. What an idiot, to pull out in front of an ambulance, and yet how great to see that he had the error of his ways pointed out to him. Did he honestly think that it would be OK?

**************

The second incident was on my afternoon off. There is a small crossroads near my house that always has a reasonable flow of traffic, and can get quite busy during rush hour. It was moving more slowly than usual, and I realised that there was a broken down car sitting on the white line. As I drove around, I realised that it was a lady on her own. I pulled in and walked back to her. There must have been tens of cars who had already gone past, even as I was walking to her car I saw a number of people just drive around her.

She was fine, not panicking, and had called the AA. I suggested that it might be a good idea to move the car out of the way, so she wasn't blocking the junction anymore. I pushed her off the white line, around the corner and ran out of steam before I could push her off the main road. At this point only (after pushing from a standing start, up a gentle slope) did two more guys materialise to help push her out of the way. The lady knew one of them, and she had the AA on the way, so she thanked me and I got back in my car and went home. I had a harder workout in two minutes than I would have had in two hours in the gym!

My question is, why did all those other people just drive past? Why did I have to push her from standing, for two hundred yards around a corner and up a slope, before anyone offered to help? I am not a big bloke (5'6" and slightly built, and she was driving a Volvo V40 - not a huge car, but certainly not a small one), so did people think I was practising for some kind of endurance test?

If you have the number, feel free to call the Karma Police on my behalf...

**************

Surprisingly, this was my 200th post on Rish's Diary - where do they all come from?