3 Thoughts from Saturday

I know, I still have part 2 of "Meet the Prakasams" to finish, but I was in LA all week and then I had a really busy weekend. In lieu of that, here are some things worth mentioning from the weekend:

I keep seeing this commercial for the Diners Club Card. The slogan is: "The world is open. This is the key." Does that make sense to anyone? If it's open, why do you need a key? Did anyone run that by the department of common sense beforehand, or did it go straight from some VP to the air?

Ramya and I were all over the DC/Arlington/Alexandira area Saturday, so of course we ran into some traffic. It was one of those construction spots were you abruptly lose a lane with little warning, so we were kind of stuck. Ramya was signaling and trying to merge, but this being DC, that only made people speed up to cut us off. Eventually she took the best opening she could and got over. We totally cut off this lady in a big old red SUV, but what are you going to do, right? So we crawl along through the construction and eventually it opens back up into two lanes and traffic is flowing smoothly. All the sudden, there's a big blast of car horn next to us. We look over, and it's the SUV lady we cut off, laying on the horn, looking us in the eye and screaming her head off. Eventually, she speeds away. Here's what I like about this:
1. Yes, we cut her off. We needed to get over, and she was one of 50 or so people being a jerk and not letting us. Sue us.
2. It's not like any lives were ever in danger. We were crawling along in the 5-10 mph range when it all went down.
3. Our windows were up, her windows were up. Were we supposed to understand what she was saying? I can't read lips or anything, but she sure looked pissed. And my favorite part:
4. The honking/yelling confrontation happened about 5 minutes after we jumped in front of her. So really lady, you were crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic, someone did something to make you one car further back in line, and that made you mad enough that you still wanted to retalliate a full 5 minutes later? I mean, you idled along thinking about it for 5 minutes, and decided that yes, this is what I need to do? And after a full 5 minutes of contemplation, yelling at us with your windows up was the best you could come up with? Give me a break.

And finally, we went to the grocery store to pick up some stuff. I went to grab something off of a shelf next to a lady who was pushing one of those carts with the little car in front that you put your kid in. So to visualize, we were in a line- the lady getting something off the shelf, the cart, then me, standing about 6 inches from the front of the cart. Out of the corner of my eye I see the cart lurch forward, right at me. Thanks to my cat-like speed and reflexes I was able to awkwardly jump out of the way with minimal cart contact. As soon as I was clear I looked up at the lady, fully expecting to see her pushing the cart in one direction while looking in another (one of my biggest pet peeves- I could write a book about people not looking where they're walking, and chapter one would be called "the Airport"). In any case, nope. She was looking right at me, with no expression whatsoever. So, it's not that she didn't see me standing directly off of her stern, it's just that she figured instead of a) turning her cart and going around me or b) saying "excuse me" so I would move, her best option was to c) without word or warning accelerate her cart up to ramming speed and assume I would leap out of the way. It's not like I walked in front of her while she was moving- she was stopped, turned around and looking through things on a shelf when I walked up to look at said shelf. What ever happened to common courtesy?

That's it for now. I hope everyone had a great weekend!