Thursday, February 18, 2010

snow specific peeves

I love winter. I love snow. But the combination of people and snow annoys me. People just do reeeeally dumb, inconsiderate and even dangerous things in the snow. Like driving in a blizzard. But here's a few things that specifically drive me nuts....
  • People who don't completely clear the snow off their cars. That's just dangerous, people. If it's just the roof snow, there's a good chance that it will just fly off car onto the windshield of other cars. But I've even witnessed people who didn't clear the snow off the hoods of their cars. That's dangerous for the driver - that snow can fly up in the windshield and there's a good chance that these same people haven't dug out their windshield wipers - so how can they see to drive?!
  • If they're going to plow the roads and shovel the sidewalks, why can't there be a path from one to the other? I get that the roads are cleared by the city/county/state and the sidewalks are the property owner's responsibility but it's hard to navigate when there's no transition from sidewalk to road and back again. I've seen so many nicely cleared sidewalks that just end in a huge pile of snow. WHY??
  • People who walk in the road with traffic. Is it not still the rule that when walking - no matter the conditions - you're supposed to walk against traffic so that you can see the cars coming and they can see you (and know that you've seen them)? This is especially true when people are having to walk in the road because there are no sidewalks. I swear someone is going to get killed.
  • People who decide that traffic rules no longer apply because there's snow. Last I checked it didn't matter if there was snow or not; if an intersection says no U-turns, they mean no U-turns. We definitely saw people pulling that maneuver in the middle of Washington Street in Old Town in the slushy snow on my birthday.
  • and last but certainly not least, if someone has gone to the trouble to dig out a parking spot and mark it with something - do not steal it! Seriously, digging cars and parking spots out from 3 feet of snow was a pain in the butt so we tried to move our cars as little as possible and left a cooler in our spot when we did move (a lot of people are using chairs but we were afraid of it blowing away in the wind). We were nice and didn't even try to save our spot when we went out of town for 3 days. But when we finally moved my car for the first time in nearly a week, we came home at 11:30pm only to find that someone had nicely put our cooler off to the side and took my spot! It can be hard enough to find a parking spot around us at 11:30 at night regardless of weather conditions but this was probably the most annoying thing I've experienced in a LONG time.

3 comments:

  1. Totally with you on this post! Love snow, but hate how it makes people dumber! I saw a guy run a red light and I'm pretty sure it was because he thought it was okay due to all the snow on the ground.

    RE saving spots. You can't really enforce it, I guess we can only hope that people will be considerate and not take parking spots that they did not shovel out themselves. Karma will come back and bite the neighbors that took your spot's butts!

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  2. Yeah, I know you can't enforce people saving spots but it's just mean-spirited.

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  3. It drives me crazy too.

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