A Different View
Confessions of a motorist raging against the lights
There’s someone I would know well who is relatively mild-mannered – until they sit behind the wheel of a car and turn into an obnoxious git.
Our friend, in fairness, isn’t up there with Jeremy Clarkson – either behind the wheel or if he was looking for a late steak for his hotel dinner – but there’s a testosterone trigger that rears its head as soon as he lands in the driver’s seat of an ordinary family car.
It mortifies the rest of the family and in truth doesn’t make him feel all that great either – but there’s a Pavlovian gene deep inside that forces itself to the surface like a form of Tourette’s every time someone does something on the road that annoys him.
He takes these misdemeanours personally as though the Road Safety Authority has appointed him as a sort of undercover watchdog on the rules of the road.
Slow drivers, mummies in their urban tractor who pull up in the middle of the road to drop off their little darlings for school; people who don’t anticipate the green light at junctions; kind motorists who let a succession of other road users out from side roads ahead of them – they’ve all wondered who the lunatic is that’s having a mild fit behind them.
Our friend has even made hand gestures at people he knows – obviously he didn’t know that when he gesticulated and then he has to try and make it seem like a fist was actually a sort of a friendly wave.
There is no logic to any of this, and in the cold light of day he himself hate road rage drivers as much as the next man – but in fairness he’s equally not the first or last man to be transformed into a nut job as soon as they sit into the driver seat.
It doesn’t happen every day, and he does let others out ahead of him because he also depends on fellow drivers to extend him that courtesy in turn or he’d never get out of his side street.
He makes a point of letting people cross the road in front of him and he’s always watching out for children jig-acting on the footpath for fear they’d lose their balance and tumble onto the road.
But if others try to edge out ahead of him or stop for no reason in the middle of the road or spend more than five seconds responding to the traffic lights going to green, a red mist can descend in seconds.
In defence of my acquaintance, I should point out that this form of bad behaviour doesn’t involve breaking the rules of the road – indeed it is partly down to his self-appointed role as a guardian of those rules, a sort of younger version of Gay Byrne, in the first place.
He sees someone on a mobile phone and signals wildly to them that they are breaking the law; it’s not his job of course because he’s not a member of the Garda Siochana, but then the sight of a middle-aged man waving wildly can often have an even greater effect on a phone user than the boys in blue at a checkpoint.
If our driver has the right of way at a junction and someone else tries to sneak out, they will get a blast of the horn and a dagger look – a response that gives our friend some degree of misguided satisfaction that lasts for all of ten seconds at most.
He isn’t aggressive in real life but all that changes when the driver’s door closes – now he’s the king of the road and any challenge to his title will be treated with the sort of response with which Robert Mugabe used to crush domestic uprisings against him.
Our man is not alone in his role as a monitor of the motorway because he too has been on the receiving end of clenched fist or elevated digits from drivers in other cars for what they perceive as motoring mistakes on his part.
He has never got out of the car to engage with other drivers – which may be down to two reasons, the first one being that this sort of thing can quickly escalate into an incident which ends up in the District Court. The second reason is that fundamentally – and for all of the bravado behind the safety of a driver’s door – he would admit that he’s a coward at heart who would no more fight a fellow driver than he’d attempt to wrestle a lion in his lair.
In his further defence, he doesn’t get involved in speed races because that is wrong and dangerous….and anyway he doesn’t own a particularly fast car.
Perhaps back in the days of our relative youth, life was one long road rally – but safety concerns (and speed cameras) have taken that need for speed out of his arsenal.
And rightly so. It couldn’t be said that he’s a dangerous driver and he knows deep down that he shouldn’t be an aggressive one either – but there must be a Neanderthal gene still embedded deep within that rises to the surface as soon as the engine ticks over. T
hey do say that acknowledging the problem is the first step to solving it but our pal has long known that bad behaviour has no place on our roads and still this driver aggression manifests itself.
I can only try and convince him of the error of his way – and I’ll be sure to see him the next time I look into the mirror.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The only time in your life that you should ever utter the words: “Do you know who I am?” are if you’ve just had a bang on the head or you are unfortunately suffering from dementia.
Because, otherwise, the phrase ‘do you know who I am’ only serves to make things a whole lot worse.
Normally, the phrase is unleashed towards late night door staff on a wave of alcohol – and never once in the history of time has it produced the result the utterer had intended.
The doorman may well know who you are which is often the very reason you’re not getting into the place in the first instance – or if he doesn’t know who you are, he won’t be unduly influenced when he does, unless you’re a famous movie star or his long-lost cousin.
‘Do you know where I am?’ might often be closer to the phrase you’re looking for, because that would serve you well when you’re looking for a taxi.
‘Do you know who I am?’ is a threatening phrase that in truth wouldn’t frighten the cat. But if you’re anxious to dig the hole a few shovels deeper, you should follow up with ‘I’d like to speak to your manager.’
Managers can be elusive at the best of times, but they’re normally rarer than hen’s teeth when it comes to the small hours of the morning – and even if they’re there, they are most likely watching proceedings on CCTV…just so they know who you are, in case you yourself can’t remember.
‘I’d like to speak to your manager’ suggests that you and he or she are from the one social sphere which is several strata north of the one occupied by door staff.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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A Different View with Dave O’Connell
As it turned out, we were much closer to a Eurovision win than we could ever have imagined – not Ireland, of course, because we’ve now mastered the art of just sending cannon fodder to be blown out in the semi-final.
No, this was just two of us – myself and our eldest – who were lucky enough to be at Anfield for the Reds’ recent win over Brentford, where positioned in the seat right in front of us were four happy lads from Finland.
One of them, we now know, was Käärijä, the singer of the catchiest song at Eurovision, Cha Cha Cha.
But just a week before 7,000 people sung his catchphrase at the Eurovision Arena, he and two his mates – accompanied by an older bloke who had to be either his dad or from the national broadcaster – sat anonymously in the same corner of the lower level of Anfield’s Main Stand.
He was utterly unknown to us as well of course, and the only thing that saw him stand out was his green nail varnish. Live and let live, of course, but it still ensures that you make an impression even if it looks like you were just very late for St Patrick’s Day.
Käärijä may well be Liverpool’s greatest Scandinavian fan, although the bar for that is set fairly high, given that they invade the city in greater numbers every two weeks than the Vikings did just once during the first millennium.
Equally, he may not be a football fan at all – although, as the rest of the week proved, he sure loves a crowd.
Positioned as we were in the corner of the Main Stand, the next section to us, around the corner in the Anfield Road Stand – currently adding a top layer – was occupied by the visiting Brentford supporters.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
Contactless payments reached a record €17.9 billion in Ireland last year – up by 31 per cent on 2021, as people came out from under their Covid shell and appear to have left their cash behind them.
Figures from the Banking & Payments Federation found that – despite the cost-of-living increases – the Irish public made three million contactless payments a day, worth an average of €53 million in the final quarter of 2022.
Given that there are 3.8 million people in Ireland over the age of 18, that means that almost every single one of us tapped the card every day last year.
And again, on the presumption that there are a few who still prefer peeling a fifty off a wad of notes, the true figure may be even higher, as we eschew actual money every time we go into a restaurant, bar or shop.
Then comes the monthly morning of reckoning when you open your statement – electronic of course because, like paper money, banks don’t deal in paper statements anymore either – and your guilty secrets unfurl like a rap sheet before your very eyes.
Five taps of a Friday night in the local, followed by a five-ounce burger meal on the way home.
And just why did you need a family-pack of crisps when a small bag would have done? Was all that beer and wine really for a party, or a night in just for one?
Cash provided plenty of dark corners to ignore your profligacy, but there are no hiding places in the contactless world.
Worse still, until that morning of reckoning arrives, you’ve no clue how much you’ve spent, and handing over the card doesn’t hurt half as much as parting with hard cash.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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