A couple of months ago, I was in my car on the way to work when I encountered some obnoxious pedestrians. They were trying to cross the road while they were wrong. Here in KL it’s a pretty regular occurrence, and I don’t have any issues with it because those people usually know that they are wrong. But if there’s one kind of person that’s more annoying than the wrong pedestrian, it’s the wrong pedestrian who thinks they’re right.
It’s kind of difficult to put into words what happened, so I’ve illustrated a diagram to make things clearer:
I had my windows down (a normal thing to do when you’re smoking), and because I had to wait for a pedestrian to cross the road in front of the car in front of me, I heard this one guy muttering to himself, “fucking asshole…fucking asshole…” as he counted the cars that refused to let him pass. As though we were assholes because he broke the rules.
Normally I’d just ignore assholes like him because there’s really no point wasting my breath. We’d never see each other again, and my life wouldn’t have really been affected (unless we take into account the butterfly effect of me slowing my car down by 10 seconds because I was inconvenienced by the pedestrians – even then I don’t remember it making a difference to my day). All he would become was a story I’d tell, but no. Something snapped inside me and I screamed at that idiot out my car window, “you’re the fucking asshole!”
And for those of you who know me, I do a pretty mean scream (at least when I’m performing), so it wasn’t me blowing things out of proportion. I don’t know why I did it, I think he heard me but I didn’t stick around to find out. But what surprised me was that it felt good to yell at him. Then I hoped to myself that he would die in a horrible fashion while jaywalking again in the future.
The drive was long, and I calmed down by the time I reached the office but I was still thinking of the incident. I didn’t feel proud of what I did. I don’t know why I did it. But I guess there’s some fire in me too, despite my usual apathetic behavior.
I’m not sure if it changed his life in any way but now I hope he injured and paralyzed for life for being an asshole pedestrian. Death would be too kind for him. If there are working traffic lights, and/or pedestrian crossings, please use them. They are there for a reason.