The bad drive-in diner

Photo: Ryan McVay

If you have done a lot of driving, or if you come from Europe, it is not hard to fault North American drivers. Does it mean that I am always perfect on the road? Absolutely not, but I do drive a little like an old fart compared to when I am competing.

One day, I will put a GoPro camera on my dash and just drive around and film people driving. It will be a great opportunity to get some material for my presentations. What prompted the idea was an incident last week that, quite frankly, blew my mind.

I was driving my mother-in-law to an appointment, and heading toward Kelowna on Highway 97. It wasn’t difficult to notice that the car in front of me was not just swerving in the lane, but very nearly causing accidents with the traffic around it. Not only did the car have some serious sideways momentum going on within the lane, the speed was going up and down by 20 to 30 kph.

I looked at my mother-in-law and said, “I have to pull up next to her and tell her to get off the phone before she kills someone or herself.” I was expecting a younger driver to be texting, which I know is a huge judgement but it is commonly what I witness. I was staggered to see, instead, a middle aged woman who was not on the phone.

It was easy to see what she was doing. She was eating her lunch. And it was not your ordinary burger. This was a full meal deal. Fork, plate, food sliding everywhere. One hand holding the plate while attempting to steer the car (which clearly she was completely incapable of doing), the other forking food into her mouth. 

It was clear that she was more worried about getting food on her clothes than about the lives of the motorists around her, because she sure was more adept at scarfing food than she was driving her car.

If I recall, it was a dark coloured Kia, which weights approximately 1200kgs.

For goodness sake, and I hope, madam, that you are reading this, don’t eat your dinner while driving on your way to work. You are the type of moron who keep insurance rates unnecessarily high for the rest of us.

When I pulled up beside her to get her attention, she clearly felt guilty, because she was avoiding any possible eye contact. Or was she just too focused on not spilling food on her fancy clothes?

The reason we see more driving accidents than we should is for one reason: People do not give driving the attention it needs and deserves. 1,200 kgs is a license to kill, treat it with respect.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.