1 Happy St

I hate when I’m the 2nd car stopped at a red light in the right lane when I have to turn right, but the busted 1st car is going straight. It’s especially frustrating if it’s a long red and there is no traffic coming from the left. Here we are just sitting when I could have turned right on red over a minute ago. In my opinion, if you’re the first car going straight at a red light and someone pulls up behind you who needs to turn, you have two options/responsibilities.

1. You pull up far enough into the intersection where the car behind you can go around you. Now obviously this could have repercussions. Pulling up too far into the intersection could put you in harms way. But in my opinion, it’s your own damn fault for picking the right lane when you could have just as easily moved over to the left before you got there. If you’re pulling up to a red light and you’re going to be first in line and the left lane is open, it’s your responsibility to check your rearview to see if there’s a car behind you with his signal on. If so, you’d better get the fuck to the left. And if you don’t, you’d better inch up and let that guy past. It’s simple etiquette. Now if you inch up BUT HE DOESN’T GIVE YOU A LITTLE WAVE as he passes, you then have permission to make the turn yourself and follow that son-bitch and harass him ‘til he acknowledges you ‘cause that was bullshit.

2. You make the turn yourself and then turn around at the first opportunity. This option doesn’t serve you all that well and could be dangerous, but again, it was your fault we’re all in this situation in the first place, so it’s on you to fix it.

So those are your two options. Of course you could choose option 3 – sit there like an idiot. But if the guy behind you ends up killing you, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Following up on Brian's coffee cup dilemma yesterday, I just had an encounter that I'm also looking for advice on.

It seems that whenever I walk through a door and someone is behind me, they are just the wrong distance back so that if I hold the door for them, I have to stand there waiting for them to catch up and then they do that uncomfortable jog up to the door because then they feel bad that you held the door for them and they would have just preferred you hadn't because now they're running and they really weren't in that big of a hurry to begin with. But then if I decide to ignore them and not hold the door, I run the risk of them thinking, "What the hell, man? Just slam the door in my face, why don't you?!"

So the question is, what is the distance where you absolutely have to hold the door for the person behind you without look like a total tool or a total jerk?

And what did they do in Star Trek with those doors that swoosh open and closed? Did you ever just stand there in the doorway with the door swooshed open while you waited for your Vulcan friend to catch up when really all he's thinking is, "The logical thing to do would be to just walk through the room portal and just let me worry about swooshing the door myself. What, just because I've got pointy ears, I can't swoosh my own damn door? Condescending human prick!"