My little rant. Rude service workers. Garbage Truck jerks today!

[Denninmi]

Just a quick little rant. I travel one road that is a "cut-through" for commuters (approved cut through, mind you, no restrictions except for commercial trucks over a certain weight limit). It's rather narrow, and goes by a lake. A ton of people use it daily during rush hour. It's about a mile long.

This morning, I got on it, and soon got right behind a garbage truck. The two men picking up garbage COULD HAVE pulled over and let cars pass by. But, they didn't. There was soon a line of probably 50 cars behind me. Everyone in the line had to stop at each of about 20 driveways as they slowly crept down the road. The driver of the garbage truck purposely stopped dead center each time, so that no one could pass on either side. He did let two cars going the opposite direction from the main traffic flow (away from the city) pass at one point, and his companion got out and stopped traffic from my direction with his hand until they passed, and then driver dude pulled back into the center of the lane.

Would it really have delayed them to pull over ever 3-4 driveways and let people pass? Took about 10 minutes each out of the lives of at least 50-75 people.

Honestly, I think they enjoyed it. I know that when they finally got out to the main, multi-lane road, it appeared that they got the finger from more than one person who was in that line (NOT me).

[Tobin S.]

1. Busy road, rush hour, 50 cars

My guess would be that they did things the way they did because they feared not being able to get back on the traveled portion of the road for a long period of time so that they could do their job.

Whatever the reason, I don't think they were just being jerks. I've driven a truck for a living for the past 15 years and have found that car drivers tend not to cut you any slack, especially in heavily populated areas. Nobody wants to be behind the big slow truck.

[siligut]

2. It was rush hour on I-5 in Seattle

Crazy stupid traffic. There was a truck in the far right lane, he needed to be in the far left lane to take his exit. Seattle has on and off ramps on both sides of the highway. He was holding up people behind him with his left blinker on.

I stopped in my far left lane with another person stopped in the lane next to the truck, and then people in the two middle lanes finally stopped, we were all holding up rush hour traffic, but this truck crossed all three lanes in front of us and pulled his horn as he got onto his ramp. I was pretty impressed with Seattle drivers that morning, because usually we are assholes.

To Denninmi, that sounds insane, too bad those guys don't time their pick-up during a less busy time of day.

[trof]

3. They were doing it because they could.

Bet they thought it was really funny.