It Must Be A Conspiracy Or Who Needs More Of You?

As I’ve mentioned before, despite my facetious references to the existence of one, I don’t really believe that there’s any sort of vast conspiracy consisting of people whose mission in life is to irritate me.
Sometimes, though, it’s very difficult not to believe that.
Like this morning when I was driving to HQ for my CSS class and I was behind someone who was driving along at an acceptable speed, causing me no real irritation - right up until I started thinking how amazing it was that this guy in front of me wasn’t driving in a way that pissed me off.
Yesterday morning when I was driving to HQ I had begun to wonder if someone had set off a neutron bomb or something; there was absolutely no one else on the road.
That didn’t last long, though.
Traffic on this particular road used to be extremely bad due to the fact that, for about two and a half years, it had been under construction. Recently, the construction was completed, turning what had once been two lanes into three, allowing traffic to flow much more freely.
Much more freely, that is, after you get to the point that it’s been expanded to three lanes. That point on the road doesn’t actually come until just before HQ and after a major intersection at which thousands of cars make their way onto the road.
So at a certain point before the intersection there is a major bottleneck, as traffic can’t really begin to flow until after the two lanes split into three, and traffic backs up for about two miles.
Yesterday morning when I was alone on the road it was because everyone else had already made it to the bottleneck and they were all there waiting for me.
This morning I decided to take a slightly less direct route, which can allow me to merge into the bottleneck a bit further ahead of where I would run into it if I took the direct route.
So everything was going fine until, as mentioned, I thought about how the guy ahead of me wasn’t pissing me off.
We were approaching the intersection that merges with the bottleneck at about the halfway point and everything was going fine.
Then, about a hundred feet from the turning lane, the guy in front of me slammed on the brakes and came to a complete stop for no apparent reason.
He stayed there, brakes on, for about thirty seconds. As I said, there was no reason for him to stop. No geese crossing the road. No other vehicle in front of him. Nothing.
It wasn’t even like he was digging around in his glove box to try to find something. He was just sitting there stopped as if he were at a red light, even though the light was more than a hundred feet away.
I couldn’t go around him, as there was too much traffic in the other lane. I was completely at his mercy.
Finally, he did start moving, and with what happened next, if viewed from the conspiracy perspective, his inexplicable dead stop suddenly became explicable.
As we approached it, the light turned red.
If he hadn’t made that sudden, pointless stop, we would have caught the light when it was still green and been able to join the bottleneck.
Now, stuck at the red light, it was entirely possible that the vagaries of traffic movement in the bottleneck would leave us unable to move for more than one cycle of the lights.
Fortunately that didn’t happen, but the fact remains that the only possible explanation for the car in front of me suddenly coming to a dead stop was so that it could serve as a dilatory action preventing me from catching the green light and intended to piss me off.
Okay, the less pessimistic among you might think that maybe the God or the Universe or Fate, or whatever stopped me for a reason. Maybe if I hadn’t been stalled out I would have gotten into an accident or something, and so the only way to help me was to inconvenience me in some sort of “hurting in order to help” tactic worthy of an episode of “Wonderfalls.”
(Sadly, Scott is probably the only Threshold reader who will understand the “Wonderfalls” reference.)
Honestly, though, I think that most anyone can agree that even if the Universe (or God, et al) isn’t out to get me, there’s no chance whatsoever that it’s actively trying to help me…
My CSS class was pretty uneventful.
Kathleen had a “working lunch,” so I was left on my own for lunch. I had a quick slice of pizza, then sat outside and read an e-book on my PDA for the rest of the hour.
One thing I noticed about all of the people buzzing around in the hallways and the cafeteria was that pretty much every third woman I saw was knocked up.
I swear, people out here are breeding like it’s going out of style. At the rate it’s going this place will be some kind of Malthusian nightmare within a couple of years.
Maybe we’ve got some kind of exchange going on with India: they get all of our tech support jobs and we get to become overpopulated.
I mean, come on people. I can understand the impulse to get up at bat, but you don’t have to hit a home run every time.
Seriously, you can’t all be Catholic. Rubbers, IUDs, shots, operations…there are lots of options to choose from.
It’s not like there aren’t already enough of you out there getting in my way. You really don’t need to make more…
Anyway, I’m pretty much done with training for a while.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with my new skills, or how I’m going to keep them current. There are some things I can try out here at Threshold, but for other tricks and techniques I would need to have a more standard Web site set-up.
Of course, considering that I got the training through work, I could work on my department’s internal Web site. That does have a certain appeal, but for any pros there may be there are quite a few cons, mostly in the form of bullshit hassles, as there are already multiple people, across different shifts, who maintain the site. Whenever you get several people involved…well, you all know how I feel about people, so I think you can figure out where I’m headed.
So I don’t know. Overall, I really just wanted to pick up the skills solely for the sake of picking up the skills. “Learning something new is its own reward” and all that.
Or something.
Since I got my car back I’ve noticed that, as I’d hoped, the problem of my “Check Engine” light coming on intermittently has gone away, as it was mostly likely related to the fuel-sending unit problem.
Last week I was heading to the store, and after having driven a short distance I noticed that the parking brake light was on. I thought, “Oh shit,” as it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d driven down the road a bit with the parking brake still slightly on.
The thing was, though, that the car didn’t have that telltale sluggishness usually associated with having the brake on, and when I checked the lever, it was, in fact, off.
So apparently something is out of whack.
At first, it took an odd combination of things to make the light come on. If I took a right turn, it would come on, and if the A/C were running, it would stay on. With A/C off, it would only come on briefly after making a right turn, but then would go off.
Now it just stays on all the time.
Next week I’ll have to stop by the dealership and see what those clowns did, I guess.
I walked over to Safeway earlier tonight to pick up a few things, and along the way I noticed something interesting in the window of the pet store.
Long-time Threshold readers know that I’m not a fan of pets. In fact, I wrote a lengthy rant (the link to which I don’t feel like tracking down) on the topic, which actually cost me a friendship (some people are so sensitive about being called crazy).
Suffice to say, I’m not a person who’s likely to own a pet, or to even bother window-shopping at pet stores.
Still, I couldn’t help but be amused by the fact the store had a display of Hermit Crabs. If I were of a mind to own a pet, I can’t think of one that would be more appropriate for me…