stop following me
I got tailgated in 70-80 mph traffic for about 15-17 miles on my way in to work yesterday. He was so close I could only see about 2/3-3/4 of his hood the entire time, otherwise I would have gotten his license plate number. If I changed lanes, he changed lanes. If I sped up, he sped up. If I slowed down, well, he had to slow down because he wouldn’t budge from his position behind me. It was annoying, then funny, then really damn scary. I was worried he was gonna follow me to work, but he got off the freeway a few exits before me.
This was because he was driving so close and aggressively behind me when we were getting on the lead up to the on-ramp that I gave him a tiny brakeage, while we were going maybe 20 mph. So he tailgated me even more aggressively as we were getting on the freeway, and I let him pass me to get ahead. I gave him a good-bye flip-off. I guess that’s when he decided he would get behind me and tailgate me as far as he could. I don’t know: I gave him the finger and he decides to explicitly threaten my life with his reckless driving, as well as implicitly threaten me by appearing to follow me to my destination. I am so angry that he was able to make me feel as afraid as I was. The worst thing about the situation is that from the start, he was the one driving recklessly and I was the one driving sanely. And he felt like it was his right to get so pissed off as to chase me about. What the hell. I wish I could kick him in the balls, that jerk off.
ETA: I also forgot to say that he put his highbeams on the entire time after he got behind me. If it were night, this would have been pretty bad, but luckily in the daylight, it barely made a difference in my vision.
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On a completely separate note, I was thinking that I need something like news.google.com but for my subscribed rss feeds. A lot of the political blogs I read cover the same general topic, so it would be nice if something could collect similar entries and group them together from across different blogs.
that’s scary and gross 🙁
on an unrelated (and infantile) note, when I first read this entry, I misread the last bit as “What the hell. I wish I could kick him in the balls, then jerk off.”
:-O !!
pardon me.
-max
I know exactly how you feel. That’s scary stuff. One time a few years ago I managed to somehow piss off some crazy chick on the freeway, so she tried to follow me home.
I forget exactly how it happened, but I remember that it was completely my fault, and I felt like an ass for it, so I smiled and waved apologetically, hoping she wouldn’t be too mad. Strangely, she didn’t express any emotion what so ever. She almost seemed not to notice (cool!), so I forgot about it for the time being. Several exits later though I noticed that she was still behind me, still wearing the same, emotionless stare. I still didn’t think too much of it at that point, until she followed me off the exit.
When she followed me into my sub-division, I started to get really worried. Up to this point though, there was still a chance that it could’ve been coincidence, but not wanting to take any chances I didn’t go straight home. I made a strange turn, one that didn’t make any sense given the direction we’d come from, and she was still there, still staring. Now I was freaking out.
I sped up a bit and made more random turns. Still there. Still staring. Go figure, this would be the one day that I forgot my cell phone at home. I made a few more turns in the sub-division, this time with the intent of driving to the police station. But before I made it back out of the sub-division, she either got bored, or finally figured out that I wasn’t about to stop any time soon, so she headed off in a different direction, still completely expressionless. I made it back out to the main road, made a few more crazy turns just to be safe, and then made my way back home.
I was still hesitant to get out of my car though. I know it was crazy, but I kept thinking that she’d somehow followed me without my knowledge, and she was ready to attack me as soon as I got out of my car, of course still never displaying any kind of expression or emotion. Once inside my house, I didn’t feel any safer. What if she kept driving around the sub, looking for my car, and saw it in the driveway?
Since then, I’m kind of relieved when people get all pissed off on the road, because it seems like a much more normal reaction.
Whoa, that emotionless face is pretty scary, as is following you into your subdivision. What a violation of your sense of safety.
I just don’t know what is wrong with people.
That is pretty frightening. I’ve had two people recently do the opposite to me: I tap on my breaks to get them to back off, so at the first opportunity they speed around me and STOP dead on the highway. Luckily, they each then left me alone.