A-Train

You never know what kind of crazy guy you might tick off and how far he might be willing to take things... listen to what happened to me yesterday and then this morning, and I wasn't even inciting anything (really). I was just trying to go visit my grandmother on a casual Sunday yesterday and get a cup of coffee today. This kind of craziness didn't happen to me before when I had much sportier cars, such as a 911 Turbo, except for maybe once in a blue moon. Now, perhaps this is simply a statistically unlikely set of events. Is this an M5 thing? Believe me, I'd be the first to admit if I were baiting people.

Event #1: I'm on a medium speed (25 mph) and long one lane off-ramp. I'm going a very reasonable speed, not crawling nor going too fast, and some guy in a Town Car is maybe 5 feet off my rear bumper and stays that close for 10 seconds or so. I take my foot off the gas to let the engine brake the car a few mph and to indicate to the guy to back off just a bit, since the ramp still had a ways to go, maybe 1/8 of a mile. The guy just proceeds to get closer, maybe 2-3 feet off my bumper, literally. So I tap my brake just enough to get the rear brake light to turn red and let him know to back off. Now, really, I have done nothing to get this guy to tailgate me and I twice took kind measures to get him off my rear end for safety's sake. He continues to stay on top of me, even raising his hand and giving a face expression that says towards me "what's going on here, buddy?" Finally, I realize this guy has it in for me with him staying on top of me, so I downshift and scoot away, nothing crazy in speed, but making a bit of a chunk of space open up and I then settle into a normal traffic-flow speed. By this time the ramp is about to end and feeds into a three lane tunnel. The same guy then comes whizzing by my left at 70 mph, then swerves into my lane and slams on his brakes and comes to a near stop -- in the middle of light-medium volume flowing traffic! I literally had to do full-on braking to avoid hitting his rear bumper. Fortunately, nobody was close to me from behind. No kidding, I was maybe 6-12 inches away from hitting the Town Car's rear bumper. I honestly thought I was going to hit him -- not one of those "oh, we were so close" things but one of those "somebody was watching over me and I don't know how I didn't hit him" things. Then, the guy shifts over one more lane, now he's to my right (I was in the middle of 3 lanes) and going my same speed and he keeps jumping into my lane, about a full foot into my lane and so maybe 2 lateral feet from hitting me, as though he is going to try to knock me off the road, just like they do in the movies. I pay no attention to him and after he does this three of four times, he speeds away. I wasn't able to get his plates just yet so I sped up for a few seconds, got the plate info, and then let him go. If the guy is that unreasonable, who knows what else he'd do? Not worth it to me to find out, so I resumed my normal traffic flow pace and let him go.

Event #2: I'm exiting the drive-thru of a Dunkin Donuts, having picked up some coffee. The drive-thru-lane shares the exit to the street with the regular parking customers, so the regular customer lane (the ones they follow to exit) merges with the drive-thru lane, at which place people follow the normal rules of traffic and society to let whoever is closest to the exit to flow out first. Anyway, I begin to leave the drive-thru window (about 5 feet from where the lanes begin to merge and maybe 20 feet from the main road, and some big red pickup tries to leap in front of me to get out first. For him to go out first at this time means I'd have to hit my brakes, but he then slowed down, and so I continued to proceed at the same constant pace (a few miles an hour -- you couldn't really go faster even if you tried). No big deal, I figured, a little misunderstanding. Then, this truck creeps up so our cars' mirrors are close to touching, but I know he has to stop because he has no lane to proceed into. He has to wait for me, or so I thought. He ends up driving up over the curb to his right (I'm on his left) so that he can get into traffic before me. Finally, as traffic enables me to flow into the street, this truck keeps right on going, bouncing all over the place over the curb and back down into the street, landing with such a thud you'd think he busted something underneath the car. Then, both passenger and driver turn fully around and give me the finger. At this point they then had to take a left and I was continuing straight.

Am I missing something here?
- A-Train