The worst part of my day is the time I spend trapped in my car, idly making my way to and from work at the speed of a crawling infant, and the last thing I really need is to have that process extended because a bunch of hybrid-driving suburban folks just discovered the concept of weather. We live in New England. This place is famous for its extremes, from blizzards to heat waves, dry spells to hurricanes. Should we really be all that surprised when it tends to rain every now and then? I don’t think so. And yet, still, time and time again I find myself caught in the fallout of this phenomenon, be it accident-induced traffic or just a painfully timid driver, and I can’t help but wonder why. Why does this happen? What goes through people’s heads to make them this way? It’s one thing to be safe, that I understand, but it’s another thing entirely to just suddenly forget how to drive. I want to be able to understand that. I need to be able to understand that, for my own sanity. So I’ve come up with a couple of possible explanations, and I’ll let you fine folks decide which seems the most realistic. As always, more to come after the jump.
1) Connecticut is filled with selfish assholes: This is probably the first thing that popped into my mind when I started thinking about Scared-of-rain CT Drivers, on account of the fact that Connecticut does have more than its fair share of dick citizens. Go to just about any other state in the nation and try to approach a random stranger, and you’ll find that they’re typically polite and friendly people as long as you address them with the proper courtesy. Try that shit in CT—Fairfield County especially—and you’ll probably just find yourself ignored instead. And we love it. We love making you feel like we’re better than you, like you’re not worth our time. So why wouldn’t that attitude extend to the road? If we’re not in a hurry, why should we care if you have a two hour commute and just want to get home to your family? If we’re content to just putter along, why should we care if you’re about to have a psychological breakdown and lose the will to live? As the great Mason Miller so eloquently put it, why risk crashing my Prius and missing an hour of American Idol when I can just safely ride my brakes all the way home instead?
2) People just like making other people miserable: Sometimes I feel like some of these drivers get a kick out of watching the rest of us squirm behind the wheel. Maybe they’re sadists. Maybe their lives have just become so dull and soul-crushing that they need the thrill of our suffering just to get by. Whatever the case, I’m pretty convinced that there’s at least some small sect of people out there that drive poorly in the rain just because they know it’ll piss the rest of us off. Case in point is the asshole who decides to drive twenty miles per hour on a windy, one-lane back road even though there’s a caravan of cars waiting behind him. He knows we’re all there; he knows we want him to speed up. The logical, civil thing to do would be to pull over and let us pass him. And yet, miraculously, this mischievous bastard is still more than content to keep crawling along like there’s some invisible traffic cop auditing his every move, with no regret and no regards for the delicate human psyches he’s destroying in the process.
3) There’s a statewide rabies epidemic: If people aren’t driving like frightened little children of their own accord, then there must be something else forcing them to be this way. The most obvious answer is rabies. It’s a known fact that the rabies virus causes an irrational and uncontrollable fear of water in its host, just as it’s a known fact that rabies tends to spread primarily through woodland critters and pets. Guess what Connecticut has a lot of? If you answered either “wooded areas” or “suburban homes with pets” give yourself a pat on the back. Though, just to be fair, we would have also accepted “a shit-ton of people who can’t drive in the rain.”
4) Rival states have developed what I call ‘Mind Control Rain’: Let’s be honest, we all knew the day would come when Massachusetts and New Jersey finally got fed up with all the shit we’ve been giving them and tried to get even. We’ve been ragging on them for their shitty, reckless driving for literally hundreds of years, since before cars were even invented, so it makes sense that they’d team up and use their collective efforts to try to hurt us the same way we hurt them: by ruining our image. If they could somehow manage to make Connecticut seem like the true poor drivers of the Northeast, they’ll not only have succeeded in giving us our own terrible stigma to live with, but they’ll also have discredited years of disparagement. It’s the ultimate victory for the most sinister of plots, and it could only be possible with one thing: Mind Control Rain. Like the true villains they are, the states of Massachusetts and New Jersey must have developed a way to control the properties of the rain that falls here in Connecticut. Those of us too weak to resist are put into a catatonic state of shock at the very sight of water falling from the sky, while the rest of us are left to endure insufferable bouts of rage at the moronic reaction of our peers. It’s the perfect storm of anger and ineptitude, and would go a long way towards explaining the vast disparity between rain driving and non-rain driving in this state.
5) A Truman Show scenario, affectionately dubbed The Nateman Show: If it isn’t one of the above scenarios causing this phenomenon to occur, then clearly someone is just fucking with me.
-Nate
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