Cell Phones and PDA's

Please ... I beg of you ... I want to live. So when I'm in a vehicle with you, please ignore your cell phone or PDA. Better yet, turn the damned things off and enjoy the ride.

I good friend of mine visited me from the Niagara Falls area and took me out to lunch recently. As of this writing, I'm still recuperating from a total of 5 surgeries since September 2009. I already have a very good appreciation for how fast vehicular mishaps occur and now I am acutely aware of just how quickly I can get sick and weak and bedridden. During the trip to the eatery, up the notorious Hespeler Road in Cambridge, Ontario, her Blackberry went off indicating a text message had come in. Whilst driving her behemoth Chevy Avalanche, she reflexively picked up her Blackberry and started reading, one eye on the text and one eye on the road, so to speak. I was sitting in the front, right seat; seatbelt over my incisional hernia, feeling helpless as all hell.

Visions of a near incident on Highway 401, across the top of Toronto, flashed across my mind. This happened a few years ago when I was taking a 53 foot trailer full of raw pick-up truck bumpers to the A.G.S. Automotive Systems plant in Oshawa. An executive type male, middle aged and slightly portly, was piloting his S.U.V. of some sort down the fast lane on the 401, coming along my left as I was in the middle express lane at the time. From my perch in the Kenworth, I could see that this man was keyboarding away in his laptop, which was hidden from view to other 4 wheelers, since it was resting on the passenger seat. The traffic was crawling along at about 40 kilometers or 25 miles per hour, when ... as the habit of traffic during rush hour, the traffic came to a sudden halt. I noticed that the traffic had stopped because I was looking out my front window. However, the executive type man, who is obviously smarter and wealthier than I, continued driving towards the stopped car ahead of him, as he was busy working his laptop. He looked up at the last second and instead of slamming on his brakes in a straight line, which would have made him rear-end the car in front of him, yanked his steering wheel to the left, put his S.U.V. onto the shoulder between the fast lane and the concrete divider. He came to a stop right beside the car that was once in front of him. There remained about 12 inches between him and the car to his right and him the concrete divider to his left. Since his wheels did not lock, I'll assume he had an antilock braking system.

I must admit I was impressed by his reflexes. Then I became infused with melancholy as I realised that people smarter and wealthier than I can have such a blatantly broken survival instinct and delusional sense of their own omnipotence. I'm a low-level tradesman ... a truck driver, a Proletariat labourer. I could never operate a laptop whilst driving, I'm just not smart enough. But the Bourgeiousie , be they Petite or Grand, are smart enough.

Now I'm blue ... pardon me while I pop a Prozac.

Editor's note: No Chevy Avalanches, S.U.V.'s nor Blackberry PDA's were harmed during the making of this rant.