Incident at a Coffee Shop

As you likely have already surmised, I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting outside coffee houses absorbing the essence of Florida.  If you do so long enough, blog material just leaps into your lap.  Yesterday I was enjoying a Grande Mocha at the local shopping center, seating myself at a difficult parking lot crossroad.  Although the intersection looks a lot like a 4-way stop, the road leading to and from the lot entrance in fact has the right of way by dint of no stop sign.

Enter old Mr. Joseph Schlesselman, whom you may recall from his recent dunking in the Gulf of Mexico.  I knew it was him* because he was driving that same old Mercury Marauder, the one with the waterline on the paint job.  Hunched over his steering wheel, he drove up to the stop sign at the crossroad.  I drank my mocha, knowing pretty well what would happen next.

Another car approached from the left, on the road with no stop sign.  Mr. S started to go, then , sensing danger, fumbled around in the foot well until he blundered onto the brake pedal, stopping quickly enough to bounce his noggin off the big steering wheel.  The other car breezed through the intersection without so much as slowing down or waving to the mildly concussed Mr. S.  (No stop sign, mind you.)

Mr. S exploded into a feckless fury at the rapidly disappearing car.  He cackled obscenities that even this adult-directed blogger blushes to recall, shaking his mottled fist and spraying spittle onto the distant Marauder windshield.  Boy, was he pissed.

Eventually, Mr. S recovered enough of his faculties to negotiate the intersection and herky-jerk his way into the first Handicapped space he saw.  I sipped my mocha as Mr. S scuttled into the liquor store.  Obviously, the story was not over.

On his return, pint-sized package in hand, Mr. S hopped - so to speak - into the old Merc and see-sawed his way back onto the roadway.  Now, however, he was on the main parking lot road, approaching the very intersection where his erstwhile adversary had run the non-existent stop sign.  The shoe, as it were, was on the other foot.  (Eagle-eyed readers will recall that Mr. S has a wooden leg.)

As I slurped down the last of my mocha, Mr. S blasted through the funky intersection like a high-balling freight train on a night run to Juarez.  By that time, Mr. S's alter ego was approaching the intersection from the other direction, threatening to T-bone the blithering Mr. S.  Alter-S hunkered behind the massive wheel of an ancient Lincoln with peeling leatherette top.  As Mr. S careened on by, Alter-S managed at the last instant to bumble across his own brake pedal, noggin-smashing and casting imprecations upon the hapless Mr. S for not stopping.

And so it goes.

Newt

* Legal disclaimer:  I suppose this may not have been the same hapless Mr. Schlesselman that drove into the Gulf a couple months back.  After all, there are other old farts driving old Mercury Marauders.  That does not make me feel a lot better.

Burial at Sea Avoided

For someone who blogs about becoming a Florida resident, I have tiptoed mincingly around the subject of elderly drivers.  After all, some of my favorite people are elderly drivers.  Of course, I don't ride with these people, but they are favorites nonetheless.  Today, it's time to stop mincing tiptoes.

Witness one Joseph Schlesselman, who has been shuffling around this mortal coil for 89 years.  Joe fell victim yesterday to that bane of all elderly drivers (sorry, Joe, but 89 is certifiably elderly).  Joe's foot slipped off the brake and onto the go-pedal.  Could happen to anyone.  It wasn't even the prosthetic foot at the end of his wooden leg that slipped.  That's the other leg.  And he says the walker he uses was not in the way, either.

Praise the Lord, Joe didn't kill anyone or even himself or his bride, despite his determined efforts.  "Goodbye, this is it," he thought as the old Mercury Marauder, handicapped parking tag flailing about wildly from the mirror, bolted over the seawall and plunged headlong into the Gulf of Mexico, Schlesselmans, prosthetics, collapsible walker and all.

As the old Merc filled with seawater, several passersby dove into the tepid Gulf, bashed in a couple of windows, and snatched the Schlesselmans to safety.  Minor injuries were had by all.  The police subsequently returned to the Gulf to rescue the prosthetic leg and the walker.

Asked later by a news reporter about his escapade, Joe leaned on his walker and complained, "I thought cars were supposed to be safe."  He is upset not only with the Mercury folks for making three-ton behemoths that don't float worth a damn, but with the City of Dunedin, which apparently owns the seawall that caused the problem in the first place.  "Why," he asks . . .

Wait for it . . .

"Why would you put up a sign that says 'disabled parking' and not have barriers?"

While the reporter was no doubt struggling to maintain her last shred of professional composure, Joe followed up.

Wait again for it . . .

"If a disabled person is going to park there, something is going to happen."

(blink)

Joe says he is going to think twice about parking in that same spot again.  Funny, but Joe never mentioned in the interview - or maybe the reporter was too overwhelmed with the situation to report it - how grateful he was to the people who risked their lives to save his wrinkled old ass.

And right now, at this very moment, while the gendarmes are dragging his Mercury out of the tepid, briny drink, Joe is running around - well, metaphorically, at least - trying to rent another car.

Hertz, Avis, if you're out there, RUN.

Newt

Electronic Wisdom

Driving across the Howard Frankland Bridge (translation for northerners: big bridge connecting Tampa to the civilized world to the west) this afternoon, my beloved M3 began talking to me. "Hey!  You're losing air in one of your tires."  The damn red light refused to go out.

"Crap," I thought.  I once had a full-on blow-out right there on that same Frankland Bridge, and it was not pretty.  You see, BMW, in its wisdom, decided that cars of this magnificence have no real need for spare tires, so they didn't put one in.  No doughnut, no nothing.  The low-profile tires are not run-flats but, in fact, they run pretty well flat. They ought to for $370+ a pop.  I apparently drove some distance before I decided that something felt a little out of whack back there.

Instead of a spare, BMW gives you a phone number and an instruction: "If you get a flat tire while you own this car, give us a call." Not-very-optimistically - the car is 7 years old - I called the number and - well, I be go-to-hell if they didn't show up lickety-split and flatbed me to the nearest BMW dealer, which proceeded to rake me over the financial coals something wicked.

Anyway, with that history in mind, I promptly pulled over this morning when the flashing light started whining about low air pressssure yet again.  I walked around the car.  I kicked the rubber while very large trucks whumped past.  Everything looked copacetic, so I climbed back in and continued to Tampa, warning light still flashing just out of my line of sight.  "Can you hear me NOW?  How about NOW?"

I'll get back to this later.  This article is really about the interface between driving a car and electronic messaging.  Not the txting-while-driving stuff we've heard too much about, but the mundane electronic whispers that dog you wherever you travel, generally misinforming you about the state of the universe.

Here's one now: Florida has erected electronic billboards all over the place flashing this urgent message:

Bearss Avenue 2 Miles
Travel Time under 5 minutes

This particular sign appears on I-275, Tampa Bay's preeminent vehicular artery. It's a big sign, very high-tech, very goddamn expensive.  So it must be accurate.  My ass.  These ubiquitous signs invariably report that traffic is crawling when, in fact, it's blasting through at something north of 75 mph.  All right, 85.  It's an M3 - that's why I bought it.  Get over it.

Anyway, that's what I saw this morning - this was after the tire pressure monitor light incident -  a sunny day, no traffic, and I and everyone around me happily abusing the speed laws of the great State of Florida.  The freakin' sign said I would be lucky to average 24 mph.  (2 miles in 5 minutes is 24 mph, for the arithmetic-impaired).

In fact, no matter how freely- or fast-moving the traffic, these signs never tell you that traffic is moving more than 60 mph. Somebody paid a fortune for these signs - oh, wait! that was me - and their only function is to report that everything you see on the road around you is false.  I'm not sure this matters.  I'm just sayin'.

And another thing.  I have this swell GPS stuck to my dashboard, and I use it whether I need it or not.  (You do that - admit it.)  So, driving out of downtown Tampa this afternoon - this is after the tire pressure monitor nonsense - I punched in "Go Home."  Trouble is, I sort of know how to go home from downtown:  find I-275 and get on it.  Drive 20 miles south (it's really west); bingo - you're home.  But today the road signs to I-275 and the GPS on my dash came to blows.  And me, instead of following one or the other, I just did whatever I was told at each intersection.  Sign says go left to I-275, I turn left.  GPS says turn right in point-five miles, I turn right.

Another road sign:  uh-oh.  Now it  looks like I-275 is behind me. "Recalculating..."  And so on.  Folks, I am not the sort of guy who challenges authority.  Embarrassing but true.  I drove in circles for an - - um - - for far too long, obeying authority.  Nice town, Tampa.

I'm better now, thanks.

So the denouement is this - the tire was fine.  No nail, no leak, no nothing.  The TPM light was lying to me all along.  Just like the traffic signs on I-275.  I am disillusioned.  Again.

Newt

How Did This Get to be My Fault?

A woman I know ran out of gas in our - I mean her - car today. I went to bail her out - I mean pick her up - and she said the car couldn't be out of gas because the low fuel light had just come on yesterday. I tried starting the car for her, and it made some of those discouraging out-of-gas noises and would not start. She said no, it had been doing the same thing for the past couple of weeks and she knows she told me - I mean told her husband - about it then.

Before she could call AAA, a police car pulled up behind us, and the nice officer tried to start the dead car. Yep, he said, out of gas for sure. He called AAA for us - I mean for her. While the cop was there, I asked if he was going to arrest the woman for blocking traffic. He said no, that wouldn't be necessary. I asked him to reconsider, but he refused. I told him I knew the woman must have done something wrong, but the cop continued to be nice to her.

I loaned the woman my car so she could take her mother out for a manicure, and I waited with her car under the insistent Florida sun until AAA arrived. It cost me $6 for the gallon or so of gas the guy put in.

Newt

Mad-Dashing for Bagels

Pinellas County is that thumb that sticks out of Florida’s west coast, without which there would be no Tampa Bay. People live and breed here in mind-fogging profusion, and most of them spend every waking hour – and some non-waking hours – on the road. Vehicular progress of any sort in Pinellas takes place – if at all – on parallel north-south and east-west arteries that crisscross the thumb at two-mile intervals. Between arteries lies a no man’s land of mobile home parks, strip malls and other cul-de-sac-y places that ultimately lead nowhere except to someone else’s mobile home or the local bagel shop. Want to take the back road to get somewhere? Can’t do it. The sole option – so it’s not really an option at all, then, is it? - is to drive from your own cul-de-sac-y maze to an artery, then to another artery – et cetera – then into the cul-de-sac containing your bagel shop. You might think this a simple process, but you would be wrong,

Pinellas’s crisscrossing arteries are, in fact, full-dress highways carrying eternal, torrential traffic. They are cloven by grassy – or what passes here for grassy – medians designed to keep southbound torrents from intersecting randomly with northbound torrents, eastbound from westbound. Our quasi-grassy medians are punctuated at terrifyingly frequent intervals by opportunities, for those willing to risk life and orthopedic integrity, to turn left across the onrushing torrent to get to that cul-de sac-y place that seemed important when they first set out. No traffic lights to help. No guts, no bagel shop.

Median lanes are hair-raisingly short and narrow, and this is where hair-raising turns to tire-screeching lunacy. The traffic torrent in each direction rips along at 55 to 70 miles per hour. That’s 5 to 20 mph above the speed recommended by the Pinellas County Sheriff. To turn left off an artery, the bagel shopper must dismount while moving at ambient speed and stick a landing at zero speed in that tiny chink in the median. This maneuver tests not only brake pads and guts, but coffee-cup holders and seatbelt anchors as well. Did I mention that some Bozo in the oncoming lane always wants to occupy that same little chink of median lane you’re aiming at so he can turn left into HIS favorite bagel shop? Now the available median lane is halved and your initial closing speed with Bozo can be a sphincter-cinching 140 mph. Cream cheese with that bagel, sir?


One more point, then you can get back to your Facebook-ing. The only way to get from the bagel shop back whence you came is to mad-dash your way back to the median chink, this time in perpendicular fashion. If geometry escaped you all those years ago, this means sticking your 17-foot-long Escalade into a 12-foot-wide lane. Chronic under- and overshooters are eventually – and regularly – scooped off the pavement and reassembled at the Global Mortuary (see my diatribe of August 13 if you’re fuzzy on what this means.) However heart-clanging this maneuver may be to the mad-dasher, it is worse for the poor Bozo approaching in the leftbound torrent at his usual 70-mph cruising speed. The highest heart rate ever recorded in Florida belonged to just such a Bozo caught in mid-cellphone conversation just as a mad-dasher began his mad dash.

You gotta love this state.

Newt