Yet another person added to my "To Be Stabbed" List
The baby and I went for a walk about an hour and a half ago so that we could enjoy the nice weather before it got too hot.
We stopped at the crosswalk at Penn and Main and waited for the light to change. This intersection is notoriously hard to cross because people are always turning onto Penn from both directions. When the light turned green, I looked behind me and saw a woman in a black car with her turn signal on. She was talking on her cell phone and didn't show any immediate signs of turning. I looked across the way and a man in a silver car was looking at the black car and me. He beeped his horn and waved at me to go ahead and cross. I waved back at him and started to scurry across. There was a lot of traffic and I was trying to hurry across out of courtesy. When I got about a quarter of the way across the street, I saw something rapidly approaching out of the corner of my eye. It was the black car, taking the turn at about 25 mph. The woman, obviously engrossed in her very very important cell phone conversation, had not even looked to see if there were any pedestrians before crossing. She stopped about an inch and a half from the baby's stroller, still chatting away. I stared at her in disbelief. Only then did she put down her cell phone to scream at me through her window, which was closed. I flicked her off and pointed to the stroller when I heard another car horn. It was the guy in the silver car. He was beeping at the black car, pointing at her and screaming, “That was your fault!” I was starting to get very upset from our close call, so I just ran the rest of the way across, leaving behind me a cloud of obscenities about cocksuckers on cell phones.
Now, I take responsibility for not looking one more time before crossing, but I think anytime you come *this* close to hitting a woman and her baby, you're the asshole no matter what. I'll just say that she's lucky that her car didn't actually touch us, or I would have dragged her out of the car right there in the intersection.
I have other stuff to talk about but have to get some work done first.
