November 13, 2013 Article

The Old Coot rides the fast lane.

By Merlin Lessler

“ Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” So says my car’s passenger sideview mirror. It bugs me! I want things in the mirror to appear exactly as they are, not some distorted facsimile. . Every time I look in it to see if it’s OK to pull back into the travel lane it haunts me. “How close is that car I’m pulling in front of?” I have to swivel in the seat, crane my neck and look out the back window to find out. No easy feat for an old coot with a trick neck. It’s just another cruel joke played on us by the geniuses that design our cars. The same ones that thought we’d like car keys to be the size of a bar of soap and cost hundreds of dollars to replace. You can’t put a spare key in a “Hide-a-Key” box to bail yourself out anymore. You lose your key, you ain’t getting back home anytime soon. (Or, with any money in your wallet.)

The mirror thing has been going on for some time. I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. I’m forever pulling in too close after passing a car and then being treated to the image in my rearview mirror (which doesn’t distort the image) of an irate driver shaking his fist and mouthing, “You stupid old coot!” All because of a trick mirror. I was on the receiving end the other day; a vehicle pulled right in front of me, a big construction truck. It nearly blew me off the road. He obviously didn’t heed the warning in his mirror either.

When I recovered, I noticed a sign on the back of the truck. It said, “STAY BACK 300 FEET.” It was only the size of a license plate and spattered with mud, but at that short distance I could read it clearly. “What was I supposed to do? Pull off onto the shoulder until he moved the length of a football field ahead? Get off at the next exit?” I was perplexed. The message is unreadable at more than a few yards. Unless, you have a passenger riding shotgun, scouting the road ahead through a pair of binoculars. Otherwise, you won’t know you are inching into the forbidden zone. 

It makes me wonder about the motivation of a company whose trucks sport such a message. It certainly isn’t meant to save us from a stone or other construction debris flying into our windshield. If it were, the sign would be four feet by eight feet, not one foot by six inches. No, what the sign really means is, “If something flies off and wrecks your car, you can’t sue us; you were warned to stay back!” The only solution I can come up with to solve both the distorted mirror and the “stay back 300 feet” problems is to speed along at 80 miles per hour in the passing lane and never pull back into the travel lane. It’s called, defensive driving. (“That’s my story officer, and I’m sticking to it!”)