Cyclists and busdrivers

A favourite rant of mine is the poor standard of driving from other road users. We all have our pet hates about being road users, and some are common complaints: tailgating; middle lane hoggers; dawdling; poor lane discipline at roundabouts; not using indicators appropriately, etc, etc, etc! However, there are two breeds of road user that get my goat up more than any other: the cyclist and the busdriver.



I didn't go to Fat Fighters tonight, I had an errand to run at Dot P's and my knees and back are a little achy today so I figured it best to get the retail business sorted and hopefully I'll be feeling up to a gym visit a little more tomorrow evening. I digress! On my way back, I got to a mini roundabout: the traffic was clear from the right so I started my right turn, only to realise that a complete nob of a cyclist was hurtling onto the roundabout from the left. He showed a complete disregard, or even worse ignorance, of the rules of engagement at such junctions and was totally puzzled when I sounded my horn as a rebuke (and as a warning to him to not be such a twat again). And that is an example of the problem with cyclists: they don't have to know the rules of the road before they can get on their velocipedes like motorists have to do before they can use a car or motorbike; they're a danger to themselves and others; they complain constantly about a lack of cycle lanes. But how many cyclists pay road tax? None of them are insured. It needs to change and this is one of things that's on my "to do" list when I finally run the planet.



OK busdrivers. In all fairness, it's not the busdrivers that piss me off, it's bus lanes and the shear size of the bloody buses that take up all that space on the roads. One of the things about bus lanes that really incenses me is the way that the buses pull out into the normal traffic to get passed their mates who are dropping off or picking up - thus stopping the cars that are already squished into one lane because half the bastard road has been taken up by a bloody bus lane! But at least this happens in bus lanes that are actually used frequently. Around here, there have been quite a few 24hr bus lanes introduced on routes where there is only one bus every 10 minutes or so. This is stupid and has caused an awful lot of congestion where there previously wasn't that much. You see, you take away half of the road and the traffic backs up. It's just a pathetic mind game played by lefty town planners who get their kicks by persecuting motorists, because of course, we're all evil.



I don't know when governments will realise that congestion isn't eased by reducing the useable road surface (and now we're seeing 2+ lanes on the motorways - that's good for rush hour traffic for us poor bastards who have to commute to work because we can't afford to live in expensive cities). There are other sensible and fair methods for making most of the roads we've got and penalising the motorist is just going to piss everyone off even more and create more congestion. Stupid bastards. Of course, they can use their 2+ lanes because they're driven round by chauffeurs.



This thing hasn't got a spell check on it, I think you've probably gathered!



A Series of Unfortunate Events

Strangely enough, I'm not referring to my record-breaking FOUR massive poos yesterday - they were great! I've finally got myself a copy of the film soundtrack by Thomas Newman. Some is OK, some is great, some is a bit crap. But that's OK. I think it's the first CD I've bought in ages.



A final thing for this evening

I had an appraisal last week and I was told to think about personal development and going on some courses. Load of bollocks; it's not me that needs to change, it's everybody else. For goodness sake, if everybody went on the same personal development courses, we'd all be the same pathetic clones of psycho-babbling textbooks. The fun thing about work is coming across people who have different ways of doing things than you, either because it's so hilarious you can laugh at them for ages, or because you can learn from them. Needless to say, I ordered my copy of Mind Gym today. Goodness help us all - as if my friends didn't think I became a big enough twat when I started working for the NHS!



I could just go a pint of Strongbow and a fag.



Oh, and a quick PS. I'm currently reading The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency it's really good. And I can't figure out why the font's gone weird, but I don't really care. There, that's better.