The Sane Driver

There was a time when it was easy to tell what a driver alone in a car was doing when they were talking. It was easy because they were alone and so you knew that they were talking to themselves. So then you could assume that they were not sane and you should be careful of their driving skills. This fact is not true because most of us talk to ourselves when we are alone in the car because we know that we have the most intelligent conversations at those times. It should be added that my sanity has been challenged in the past and I think that it has never been proven that my conversations that I have with myself are in fact sane or intelligent. But I digress.

In today’s world we have added a new and alarming factor to this discussion. The hands free telephone makes it much more difficult to determine if the person in that car behind you is in fact talking to themselves or if they are speaking on the telephone. When you see someone holding a phone you know that they are using this to communicate even if it is against the law to use such devices in a moving automobile. It is those who have the built in phones or at least a hand device that is on speaker, that is deceiving. Added to the discussion is the feature that allows the device to talk back to you. This gives us the opportunity to have an argument with the voice coming from the car and makes us feel as if we did have another person with us. Of course the fact that it is not a person is not important or that other drivers don’t know that we feel as if we are talking to someone else. Is it important to know what they are doing? Probably not in most cases but if you did know that the person was not completely sane then you could make much more rational decisions and your driving would be much safer. Any time you see someone who is mentally deficient your reaction to them is what will determine their next action and you want to do those things that will make them feel the most comfortable so that they will react to you in a calm manner.

If you know them then you can use past experience to make those determinations but the chances that you do know them are not very high. When it is you doing the talking you can hope for two reactions. First that they think that you have a hands free phone option and are talking to someone important so that you’re extreme emotion is because of the nature of the call. Second they know that you are a very emotional person and that when you drive you take the time to have highly emotional conversations with yourself because you are the only one who really does understand you. So no matter what you see others doing while driving, you must always remember that when you are alone you might be doing the same thing or even worse and that despite all the things that are being done in modern automobiles that will distract us, we must still drive the vehicles at least in the short term.