Road rage and life rage

Today I was driving my car down the road on my way to see my GP.  I got to the top of my road and waited for many cars to whizz by without giving me an opportunity to turn left into the traffic.  At some point all the traffic slowed for a red light and I caught the eye of the driver of the van approaching me.  I was pretty certain that we had exchanged glances in the way that drivers do and this indicated that he was going to let me turn into the main road, but no, this was not the case.  The driver just barreled past me leaving me dumbfounded and furious. I cursed and swore and felt my blood pressure rise. The bastard! How dare he! What was the point?  Couldn't he just let me in? I think in that moment if I had been face to face with this driver I might have punched him.

I am not normally a violent person.  I have no conscious memory of ever hitting anyone.  Wait, not true. I do vaguely remember punching a nurse who was particularly unpleasant to me when I was in hospital recovering from back surgery, but I was under the influence of large doses of morphine, the nurse was mean and officious and I was not responsible for my actions.  So, I can still count my conscious record of not hitting people as unblemished and yet, given the opportunity, there are at least three or four occasions a week when I could easily wallop someone who gets in my way or is unthinkingly ( or perhaps deliberately) inconsiderate.

What causes these sorts of meltdowns?  I am not the only person I know who seems ready to flip at the slightest provocation.  No one I know actually does this, but the possibility of strangling people is ever present.  I saw it last week when Ralph was dealing with the frustrating clowns in the call centre of our internet provider.  After 29 days of fruitless phone calls it was a good thing that the call centre was in the Phillipines and not down the road.  If it had been down the road we both would now be awaiting trial for throttling call centre staff.

Living in London is a trial.  Yes, it has it's great things and is a lively, culturally rich city.  it is also noisy, crowded, dirty and impersonal.  It is the crowds and noise that cause me to feel frustrated and scratchy.  When the Underground is so packed that you have no choice but to push others out of the way it leads to poor manners and bad behaviour on the part of the most mild-mannered people.  I have seen seemingly harmless little old ladies pushing and shoving on the train, and no, it's not always me!

Today, while having my daily fix of Starbucks coffee, I found myself wanting to grab and shake a little kid who was simply running back and forth through the cafe screaming.  First one way, then the other, back and forth, back and forth, making the same ungodly noise, while her mother and friends just sat there obliviously chatting.  Actually I should have grabbed the mother and told her to control her kid.  I bet if this kid had done this at home the mum would have stopped her.  What is it about the socialising mums round here and their unruly kids?  And there are so many of them!

I then saw a group of secondary school kids, who seem to take up the entire high street, pushing and shoving each other while one of them yelled "Die, die, die". This may have referred to the recent case of the schoolteacher who reached his limit and beat a student with a dumbell, very seriously, while shouting 'die, die, die'. My schoolteacher husband finds this pretty amusing, not the state of the poor beaten student, but the meltdown state the teacher must have been in to do this. The teacher was found innocent of attempted murder in a jury trial since there seemed to be a great deal of provocation, but is there ever enough provocation for this?  We are living in very precarious times.

One of my never fail triggers is the frustration of technology.  When I moved into this house 20+ years ago there was a simple, wonky old thermostat connected to our boiler.  It worked - you turned a dial up for it to be warmer and down for cooler.  It never failed.  Two years ago we replaced the boiler and at the same time replaced the thermostat with a swanky wireless one that you can program.  You can program it for day, night, winter, summer, temperatures, times, everything but on or off, it would seem.  This morning I spent 15 minutes pressing buttons, every button on the damned thing, and I still could not get it to work.  It was, and still is, freezing in this house.  I nearly threw the thermostat through a window, but it would have made the house even colder.   So I went out and got in my car... and tried to turn into traffic but some bastard wouldn't let me in.

And so it goes, day after day after day - sometimes the only thing I can do is laugh!