Sally

This is the story of how I completely lost my cool with another driver. It was an extremely stressful day, because a financial partnership with a friend had gone disastrously wrong and we had to hand back our business car.

We agreed that my husband would drive ahead in the business car to the place we were dropping it off, and I would follow him in ours, so that he could then drive me home. On the way we had to take the older of our two children to nursery school. It was a horrible journey. My younger son escaped from his car seat and he was all over the place - trying to open the doors, climbing on me and winding up his brother. I was shouting in an attempt to restrain him, and at the same time trying to concentrate on not losing sight of my husband, who was not in the mood to be held up.

I stopped at a red light. When it turned green I tried to move off but my path was blocked by a car which had pulled out from a side street and was sitting right in the middle of the road. I made a ‘Can’t you see the green light?’ kind of gesture. The other driver didn’t like that at all. When he had the opportunity to go, he refused to move off. I became furious, honking my horn and shouting. He stayed where he was, shouting back and giving me ‘the finger’. I screamed at him and returned the compliment.

(I had to think which finger to use, because I’m not from this country, and was very pleased when I found the right one. I had used the wrong finger on a previous occasion and somehow it wasn’t as effective.)

My husband got out of his car and came over, clearly thinking that he could resolve the situation. Unfortunately he started telling me what to do, which was like a red rag to a bull. We ended up yelling at each other like children. Finally, the man shouted his final obscenity and drove off. The two boys were all over the place. It was not a day I ever wish to re-live.

I got home feeling completely frazzled. I flopped in a chair and picked up a book for some light relief. It was a joke book that I’d bought at a Christian women’s conference a few weeks earlier, and here is the first joke I read:

A woman was sitting in her car at a junction waiting for the green light. There was one car in front of her, but when the light turned green the driver failed to move. She shouted at him, pounding on the horn. He didn’t budge. She continued screaming and giving him ‘the finger’. Only when the lights turned to amber did he notice the commotion, and sped through the junction leaving her at a red light. She was left ranting in frustration. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two police cars pulled up with lights flashing and sirens blaring.

‘You’re under arrest,’ they said to the woman. She was handcuffed and taken to the police station.

After some hours had passed and her license and other documents had been checked, she was called into see an officer.

‘I’m terribly sorry, madam,’ he said. ‘There’s been a mistake.’

‘Of course there has! Why did you arrest me?’ she fumed.

‘Well, you see, madam, we saw you shouting and swearing at another driver in the road, using shocking language and making an obscene gesture. Then we saw all the bumper stickers on your car: ‘Don’t follow me, follow Jesus,’ ‘Jesus is for life not for Christmas,’ and one of those fish stickers. So we naturally assumed, madam, that you’d stolen the car.’

I laughed out loud. I told everyone at the women’s group the following week and they all found it as funny as I did. Who knows – maybe some of them even found the incident rather familiar?

The joke is paraphrased from A Bundle of Laughs by J.John and Mark Stibbe, Monarch Books.