Here’s an ineligible Darwin Award candidate
On my commute home from work earlier tonight, I saw another commuter doing something mind-bogglingly stupid. Now before I reveal what it was, allow me to paint the scene. We’re in a heavy intermittent backup heading north along I-495 towards the American Legion Bridge (which is to the west of Washington DC along the Potomac River). Keep in mind that Washington DC has the worst commuter traffic in the nation. The traffic is alternating between a relatively brisk pace and an absolute standstill. If you aren’t completely on your toes in this kind of situation, it’s very easy to ram into the rear of an unexpectedly braking vehicle in front of you.
So I happen to pull along a car to the right of me driven by a youngish white male and I notice a glow in its interior. I recently got my mom a GPS navigation system for the holidays, and I’ve been noticing them everywhere ever since, so I glance over to see what this guy has. But it’s not a GPS system. He has an ~8″ screen mounted behind his steering wheel on top of his instrument panel. I only saw it for a split-second, but it was enough to see that it wasn’t a GPS system at all; it was some kind of portable media player, and he was watching anime on it. I know it was definitely anime because I recognized the character as one that I had seen somewhere else; I just couldn’t exactly place it.
I was flabbergasted. Pardon my Mongolian, but what kind of a fucking idiot watches TV shows while they’re driving, let alone in highly unpredictable Beltway stop-and-go traffic? And why did it have to be anime? This idiot is giving geeks everywhere a bad name! Why couldn’t he be watching something terminally stupid, like Keeping Up With the Kardashians or the World Bodybuilding Championships? I at first instantly pegged him as a future Darwin Award winner, but then I remembered the stipulation in the Darwin Award rules that winners cannot injure innocent bystanders in the process of taking themselves out of the gene pool. And the way this guy was driving, surrounded on all sides by heavy Beltway traffic, I feel it’s highly unlikely that he’d be able to take himself out without injuring anyone else. So he’s probably going to kill himself at some point, but at least he won’t be rewarded with a Darwin Award for his efforts.
