© St. Petersburg Times, published June 25, 2002
So, here's the situation:
You're sitting in your car at the bank drive-through and the customer in front of you is taking an awfully long time to get through with her business.
Generally speaking, you have two options.
One is to relax, realize that the world doesn't always move at the pace and in the direction that it would if you ran things, and realize that nobody has yet found the desiccated skeleton of a waiting driver at a drive-through and that you probably will, eventually, be waited on.
Or you can do what witnesses and Citrus County sheriff's deputies say Hugh Allen McMahon did last week and begin screaming obscenities at the other driver, then ram her car with yours -- not once, but three times.
McMahon has been charged, not convicted, but the investigating officer says McMahon didn't deny ramming the car and said he didn't see anything wrong with it.
Hmmm.
Even more interesting to me was that the reporter who wrote the story for our Citrus County edition got four e-mails expressing varying degrees of approval, or at least understanding, for McMahon's alleged actions. One even said the deputies had arrested the wrong person and should have locked up the victim instead.
Okay, there are very few of us who are good enough human beings that we haven't at least once considered grabbing the bleu cheese dressing ladle at a salad bar and bludgeoning the person ahead of us if he or she rearranges the shredded carrots and black olives on top of a salad one more time.
And, yes, it probably is only the knowledge that I am being videotaped that makes me restrain myself when the bozo in front of me in a convenience-store line has to pick out, discuss, and then stand there and scratch off 10 lottery tickets, which will undoubtedly be paid for with extremely small change counted out of a change purse laboriously extracted from a wallet taken from a purse in which the customer will then route around for an additional two pennies to avoid breaking a $1 bill.
But come on, guys, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, the criminal charge in this case, is just a teenie-tiny bit over the top for being too slow in line, no matter how much public acclaim it gathers you.
Cars are not toys, and people can be hurt when you start using them to unload your angst on a hot summer afternoon.
If you think about it, much of the anger that most of us carry around eating away at our innards is born of impatience with the fact that our fast-forward buttons work on our VCRs but not on our lives.
I watched in silent awe the other day as a kid, in contention for the Guinness Book of World Records title of slowest-moving human being on the planet, took what seemed like days to figure out what the numbers on a $20 bill (the big ones, the ones that say 20) meant.
Then he made the required keystrokes to have a machine tell him how much change to give me (we are blessed that he didn't have to actually figure it out himself) and then managed to select the correct change and hand it to me.
All I did was take a deep breath, realize that the kid was probably new, that he was working and paying taxes, not collecting welfare or robbing a fast-food store, and that he rally did seem to be doing the best he could.
Then I looked around the store and reminded myself that I had the gift of vision and that my senses were being assaulted with a panoply of colors and sounds that some people can't see or hear.
I thought of recently deceased close friends and loved ones and how much they would love to be standing there in a world where a few extra seconds in line are important enough to be a problem.
And then I thought about how much I would be overjoyed to see them standing there and laugh with them about it.
Then I thanked the kid and walked slowly and gratefully to my car through a cool, drizzling rain.
Maybe, at some atavistic level, it was not as satisfying as ramming somebody's car.
But nobody handcuffed me, and I won't have to hire a lawyer to explain why I did it.