There’s something about driving in heavy traffic that makes me a little irritable. Some people may even call me a little road-ragey if they could hear me swearing under my breath at the moron who suddenly slowed to make a lefthand turn sans indicator. As a general rule, though, I keep my irritable responses mostly to myself – or at least within the confines of my car – and it’s a pretty rare occasion that I flip someone off or give them an angry beep.

Labour Day weekend traffic is horrible, and by the time I reached the three-hour mark my tolerance for stupid drivers had all but exhausted itself. I set my cruise control, turned my music up a little and focused on making it home within the next hour. All in all, the drive had been pretty uneventful and I was just glad to have gotten a head start on the traffic.

We were on the final home stretch, with about 15 minutes of drive time left, when we came up to an absolute clusterfuck on the highway. Nova Scotians are great people, really, but no one knows how to merge. To make room for those trying to merge onto the highway and to steer clear of the people about to turn off, I flipped on my signal light, shoulder-checked and eased into the left lane. I was (thankfully) slowing as I could see the cars ahead of me were slower moving than I when the car to my right decided to cut into my lane.

Directly in front of me.

At 110km per hour.

Without a signal light. And obviously without a shoulder check – I was in his blind spot.

I slammed on my brakes and laid on the horn. I think the correct word to describe how I was feeling was “furious”. I apologized to F, as I figured the sudden brake-semi-swerve was probably a little unsettling. As I passed the offending idiot, who was mouthing sorry to me, I beeped my horn again for good measure.

And that was when F piped up in the backseat.

“Mama, you’re awfully horny today.”

Cue: death by laughter. 

I’m planning to have a chat with him about not using that word to describe me in the future. Especially at school