Vault Discovery: A Word on Merging

I discovered a piece a wrote at the beginning of the summer and never posted. So here it is.

Originally composed June 19:

I recently participated in Summerfest and found it to be rather enjoyable - the food, the rides (Samantha and I have made excellent progress toward Tilt-A-Whirl expertise), and the fireworks display were all superb.

Intense concentration - or maybe the handle was dirty...

Lean!

Your other left!

Thanks for taking the pictures mum!

Notwithstanding, it was my experience in the parking lot which inspired this piece.

Merging. It's actually a fairly simple concept. Two lines become one. I recall that when I was being initiated to the road by my father, he explained that it should work like a zipper - or a "zip" as they call them across the pond. In any case, this being an object I was quite familiar with, the simile stood as an adequate explanation and I was confident that the general population was also equally well-versed in the fly-securing book-enclosing apparatus. Thus, one driving phenomenon could be checked off as a worry free occurrence.

Alas, experience has dictated otherwise. I don't know how other people's zippers work, but mine always follow the same pattern: one left tooth, one right tooth. One left tooth. One right tooth. Repeat previous sequence until all teeth have been assimilated. It's a very simple pattern. Merging should work in precisely the same way. Yet in this advanced age, people seem to want to complicate the pattern. One left car. One right car. Three left cars. One right car. Twelve left cars. Three right cars. One left car. Five right cars. I don't know about you, but I am hard-pressed to find the pattern. And can you imagine what your zipper would look like if it tried the same antics?

To those of you privileged to be instructing the next generation of vehicular operators, I have a simple request: covey the merging pattern. And the rest of us could do to take a lesson from the past, when times were slower. Can you imagine if driving were like it used to be?

Clip courtesy of The Andy Griffith Show