Situations which are not what they seem...

I've had a lot of situations lately which are not what I thought they were, and were in fact, the exact opposite of what I was expecting as a person who generally expects the worst in ordinary people.

Today, while driving home from lunch after a nice 6am-2pm day at work, I passed through an intersection near the turn for my neighborhood and changed lanes in front of a SUV in fairly tight space...not assholish tight but not the recommended distance (imagine everyday lane changes on the beltway). For the length of the road towards my neighborhood, the SUV I changed lanes in front of was sort of tailgating me...not insanely close but close enough for me to notice and watch in my rear view mirror.

I put on my signal to make the left across traffic into my neighborhood and the man behind me does the same. He pulls up very close on my bumper and I'm starting to believe that perhaps I triggered some sort of incident further on the road. Well, genius as I am, I decided to find out. I made the left turn and hit the gas in my neighborhood. The speed limit is 25 but I had to be going 35 minimum. The roads and streets were fairly clear so I was confident that I wouldn't (god forbid) kill somebody's kid or dog or something awful like that. I figured that if the guy in the SUV was really angry and following me home (which has happened to my brother before over road rage while I was in the passenger seat.) he would speed up.

The guy in the SUV sped up and kept within range of me while I was speeding. This made me more nervous so I kept at what I was doing. I came to a traffic circle where I had to slow down to a safe speed in order to let somebody around the circle properly, then I hit the gas again. The man had sped right up on my bumper as I was slowing down and had honked his horn and made some sort of gesture out the window towards my car. "Oh crap, this guy is pissed at me" I thought.

I drove through the neighborhood even faster than before, taking 3 turns very quickly, the SUV driving even faster to keep up. I was planning what to do when I got out: If the guy tried to get out and follow me up to my house I would get inside, lock the door, get one of my many guns, and call the police. If he wanted to tell me off I could stand within range of my garage and try to reason with him. As I turned up my street, the crazed, raving maniac who was gripped with anger from a perceived slight on the roadway, and aggravated to the point of chasing me turned to pursue me to my very garage.

As he pulled up the street I looked back, standing still, not sure which way to move. He slowed down, put his window down and uttered the words "Hey, sir...".

Immediately I knew I had made some sort of gross miscalculation. If he was angry and following me, he wouldn't be taking a respectful tone with me... what had really happened? It turns out that as I sped off into my neighborhood, the man, who had a couple of small children out of view in his car, had taken exception to my speed. You see, people don't like it when other people drive 35+ mph in their neighborhood, on streets where for all they know, their children could have been playing and hit by a car.

He said something along the lines of "I've never seen anybody fly through the neighborhood like that before, I have small children and I think it is very dangerous for you to drive like that". I'm not really sure if that is word for word, as I was still in a shocked stupor, but it was the general idea he was conveying at the least. I replied "oh my god! I thought I was being followed, I thought I had gotten into some sort of road rage incident, thats why I was driving so fast, I'm sorry". I don't know if the guy believed that or not, cause I probably wouldn't if some punk 20-something was speeding through residential streets, but he repeated that he has kids playing there, I said I absolutely understand, I'll slow down, I don't usually drive that fast, apologized again and walked away as he drove off.

As I was speeding to get away from a perceived threat, it only made this guy want to follow me more. Had I done nothing, he would have done nothing. Sure it doesn't make sense to me that in order to advise another driver that speeding is wrong, the man would speed, follow, and gesture wildly, but it makes perfect sense to me that a father with young children would want to tell somebody to slow down on the streets that we all share.

I've had a lot of things like this happening to me recently. People who come up to me on the streets and say "excuse me sir..." and I'm all prepared to say "I don't want any, I don't have any, No, go away, or the silent treatment altogether. The split second where you have made all pre-judgments and have judged the man standing in front of you, attempting to get your attention as someone who is trying to scam you, hit you up for money, or tell you about something you don't care to know passes. You have feelings of anger and loathing brewing up inside you, focused on this one human being who undoubtedly has something annoying or awful in store for you. Then you hear "you dropped this!" as they present you with some change, a dollar bill, a sunglass case, etc. and you feel like the biggest ass on the face of the Earth for having so little faith in mankind.

Rant over...

That particular one only happened because in spite of his politeness, that guy was being a tool, and when he made the decision to follow you, you hadn't done anything very egregious yet. His level of logic is underscored by the fact that he started following you, doing the same thing, then scolded you for it. Not to mention that if he thought you were just being a punk, he should've been worried that you would come over and rearrange his face.

So he felt like he had to follow you close to your car, speed and break his own rules just to tell you were speeding? Specialy with kids in his car? you could have been a crazy person that would have shot him up in the car and his kids for pullilng up to you like that. I am sorry to say but this guy is a moron.

Based on what you posted: I second the notion that the guy that followed you is a jerk or moron.

Sounds to me like he was going to your neighborhood in the first place, So unlike previous posters said I don't think he decided to follow you until he saw you speeding, and obviously you ticked him off by cutting him off. So he was probably following a bit to close on purpose. I do that all the time when someone cuts me off.

Was he right in following you and pushing you to speed up? No. But it also sounds to me like if you had pulled in your neighborhood and didn't speed up, he might have not followed you to the point of saying something to you.

But I have never heard of someone getting paranoid by a tailgater to the point of speeding up. I actually do the opposite when someone is tailing me, and slow down, to piss them off more, and if they were to follow me to my house....well that is their mistake, and one they will most likely wish they didn't make.

Real quick...ok not so quick side story:

Once when I was younger in a suburban neighborhood I was delivering pizza (we weren't required to wear any uniforms or have signs) on this curved road, and as I got out of my car (my door was on the road side) a care flew by clearly going way to fast for the back road, and forced me to jump back up against my car for basically my life. Scared the **** out of me. So the driver pulls up to the end of the road and stops at the stop sign, and I put my pizza bag on the top of the car and start raising my hands up start yelling at him "WTF were you thinking you almost killed me *******!". The driver just sits there as if to taunt me....and then sticks out his hand and proceeds to flip me the finger. So I start walking towards him, pissed off like no other, so pissed that I was probably going to punch him right through the window...I was heated, young, and not thinking clearly. Just when I got about 10 feet from his car he speeds off. So all this does is piss me off more.

So no lie, I ran back to my car, delivered the pizza, jumped in my car, and sped off. Now I knew the road I was on only had really two ways for him to go unless he was just driving in circles in this neighborhood. So I drove like a maniac, took a wild guess, and went one of the two ways, and low and behold...caught up to the little prick. Pull up next to this car and its some younger twerp in a car with 2 others girls and another guy. The look on this pricks face was PRICELESS. Still to this day I can see it clearly in my head. The thought of "How the **** did this big ass dude that I almost ran over and got away from catch up to me" was written all over his face.

Needless to say the rest of the story isn't as thrilling, as I yelled at him, called him all sorts of obscenities that are pretty much a blur to me now, and yelled at him to pull over and get out only for him to appear to **** his pants and quite cleverly bust a hard right at a stoplight and ditch me. I gave up, as it was obvious that he would have never stopped, and I needed to go back to work. But it sure did make me feel better to know that the kid would probably NEVER speed on that road again.

Sorry for the long story, but this reminded me of that. Just one of the dumb reckless road rage stories from my youth. I don't road rage anymore in my old age.

Sounds to me like he was going to your neighborhood in the first place, So unlike previous posters said I don't think he decided to follow you until he saw you speeding, and obviously you ticked him off by cutting him off. So he was probably following a bit to close on purpose. I do that all the time when someone cuts me off.

Was he right in following you and pushing you to speed up? No. But it also sounds to me like if you had pulled in your neighborhood and didn't speed up, he might have not followed you to the point of saying something to you.

But I have never heard of someone getting paranoid by a tailgater to the point of speeding up. I actually do the opposite when someone is tailing me, and slow down, to piss them off more, and if they were to follow me to my house....well that is their mistake, and one they will most likely wish they didn't make.

Yeah, if I didn't speed up out of paranoia he would never have followed me like that...he would have probably continued tailgating me a little bit which is confusing. I think some people just perpetually tailgate everybody and don't even know they're doing it, and as I said, I had an incident while out with my brother in high school that required calling the cops as a grown man with road rage screamed at us through the windows of our house.

We didn't own guns at that point and though we were probably both big enough to take him, we didn't want to take our chances with someone who is enough of a lunatic to terrorize some kids over nothing. In his case though, my brother didn't do anything other than yell at the guy as we passed him for doing something stupid in traffic.

I don't think it made sense for the guy to speed to tell a person not to speed, or to by honking and gesturing out the window towards other cars. I wouldn't do that with kids in the car but I did understand his concern...the streets are narrow and I personally dislike the speed at which many people travel through the neighborhood.