My Road Rage Story

by Dan
(Brookfield, CT)

I was headed to work on a bright sunny morning, and everything seemed to be going well; perhaps too well. I was traveling the highway as most of us do.

Up ahead was my exit, a regular exit to the right, except that just before it is an oncoming entrance ramp. Now if anyone has traveled the highways, you know what I am talking about. The oncoming and exit lanes are very close together. Why, I’ll never know. This was one of those.


One thing I’ve always noticed about these exits, the cars coming onto the highway always have a yield sign. Unfortunately, they are too busy accelerating, and go right through the sign. This day would be no different.

As I approached the exit, with my directional signal on, I could see there was a black car coming up the entrance ramp. Using my split second decision making, I calculated I would be slightly ahead of him when we met. Deducing this, it naturally seemed logical I should go ahead of him. At that point he would slow down slightly, and go around me. Once he had gone around me, he was free to speed up and join the rest of the commuters on the highway.

But I was wrong. He chose to speed up, not a lot, but just enough to make things complicated. Why he chose to do this, I’ll never know, but the situation suddenly became dangerous. With my directional signal still on, it should have been clear I was getting off the exit. I started to move into the exit ramp lane, but he wasn’t going to allow it. He stayed just to my right; close enough so that if I pulled into his lane I’d take off his left front bumper.

I proceeded to pull to the right, hoping he’d either move over or slow down to let me in. We headed down the exit ramp with me riding in the shoulder of the lane, and him using his left bumper to keep me out of the lane. As we approached the end of the exit ramp, it split off into three lanes.

I managed to get in the far left lane. As I did this, he pulled up within an inch of my passenger door. I was guessing he had not wanted to get off the exit, and it was clear he was now blaming me for this.

He rolled down his window, which was only inches from mine, and started screaming at me. In my embarrassment, I put on my sunglasses that were on the dashboard, and flipped the visor on the passenger side over and down to block him from seeing me. “Thank God,” I thought, “I had not opened that window this morning.”

When he realized I was ignoring him, in typical childlike behavior, he started to honk his horn, loud and long. I wanted to get out of my car, just so I could see his license plate. Bad idea, I thought. What if he decides to get out of his car? Or worse yet, what if he runs me over?

Trying to decide what to do, the light suddenly turned green. I was in the left lane and going left anyway so I decided to go. He was in the lane to go straight so I figured he would now be gone. No such luck.

He literally cut in front of the car behind me, and followed me. As I rounded the corner there were already cars to my right. After all, this was morning rush hour. He decided to go on my left. This meant he was driving head on into oncoming traffic. As I approached the next light, he was now just inches away from my driver’s door, and I thought, this guy is crazy.

Once again, as I sat at the light, he continued to scream and honk his horn, loud and long at me. When I felt this was never going to end, the light suddenly turned green, he made a u-turn in the middle of the street, and was gone.