Hallways and my POV on Rennie's Geriatric Rant

Hallways:
In colleges and high schools nationwide, hallways are everywhere. I believe one senator likened them to angry tubes that are clogged. Well, that rings true. The general nature of a hallway, or a corridor to you fancy-pants English majors.... wait, I'm a fancy-pants English major... is anger. It is infested by cobbled-together malfunctioning piles of genetic incompetence, each spouting his/her/its own brand of pathetic juvenile drivel, all while occupying space that could be better used by students and faculty who actually have things to do other than stand around and talk about how, oh my god, like, jenny, like, totally changed her hair color to like, blonde.

This happened to me today. I'm walking into one of the many buildings here on the beautiful campus of North Georgia College & State University. There is a decently sized hallway leading to the elevator. I've got a class on the third floor and I don't feel like taking the stairs, dang it. Anyway, the woman in front of me is wheeling her bookbag/luggage around the hallway, toward a pack of fresh-meat. This particular group of space-wasters has left one tiny path through their midst for weary upperclassmen to journey through. So the woman in front of me, she of the wheeled-baggage, stops in the middle of the pathway and begins looking around and talking to the drivelers nearby.

This is maddness and stupidity rolled into one neat little package. Students needing to get to the other side of the hallway are now stuck in a pedestrian traffic jam. It's a simple solution folks. Clear a path. Leave space for people to walk. Yield the right-of-way to people who are actually moving and not standing around waiting for their next class to start.

My POV on Rennie's Geriatric Rant

So Rennie over at The Skewed View goes off the other day on this rant about geriatric drivers and how he nearly died because of it. He's explained to me before the Blood Mountain commute. He said it's essentially a stretch of single car wrecks. I asked if they were single car wrecks because only one car was involved or if they were single car wrecks because the other car involved is now resting upside down at the bottom of a 40,000 foot gorge.

Anyway, I want to offer my view on this topic. I'm not going to re-hash what Rennie said, because I enjoy my own special commute to and from North GA. I cross Lake Lanier anywhere from 3-6 times a day, depending on the route I take. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Lake Lanier is a decently-sized man-made lake filled with trees, catfish the size of a school bus, sewage, catfish, old houses from it's creation, did I mention catfish?

For some reason, whenever you approach a bridge going over the lake, all drivers around you suddenly lose 50-300 IQ points. They drive like maniacs. There is a section of road that is four-lane, leading to a bridge that crosses the lake, after which the road quickly narrows back to 2-lanes. Picture if you will two UPS trucks running nearly side-by-side, one slightly behind the other as they approach this merge. I am further behind the lead UPS truck, leaving myself plaenty of room to fall back into traffic (although none to pleased about riding behind two UPS trucks for the next five miles), and there is another car (driven by Martha Washington herself) behind the second UPS truck. We approach the merge and the UPS trucks fall in, neatly tucked away for the drive. I begin to merge, having had my turn signal on for a good 10-15 seconds already, and I hear a car horn. Martha Washington has now tucked in so close behind the second UPS truck that drafting doesn't even apply. Now there have been signs for the last 1/2 mile saying that the lanes merge. We've ridden a good ways with every intention of making this merge work for all parties involved. But grandma forgot the rules and is now doing 60 miles per hour to keep me from getting in line. So I back off, and merge behind her, having nearly been run off the road in the process. Then this little old woman slows down to 30 mph. We're in a 50mph zone. I'll never get it.