The day before yesterday, my wife and I paused our trip for 30 minutes or so. We went inside the truck stop to acquire some frozen treats.
On our way back to the truck, a Canadian driver carelessly maneuvered his rig around another truck as it was backing into a parking space. As he was turning his rig onto the fuel island, he didn't give enough regard or space to me or my wife. We had to nearly run to keep from being struck by the left side of his trailer. As we got back to our truck, our new neighbor commented about what a terrible driver that was. I was going to let the incident go, but my wife was truly shaken. I reviewed the video of my dashboard camera and decided that I should go ahead and collect data on the truck & trailer. Stephanie was already writing a letter to the offensive driver' company. She told me she didn't want me to get into a heated confrontation. I obviously failed at that.
With my phone video recording, I commented on the incident and noted the identifying numbers on the vehicles. As I was recording his license plate, the driver appeared from the sleeper and honked his horn at me. He shook his finger to deny me permission to continue video recording. Camera still on, I approached his door to talk to him about the situation. He rapidly opened his door and struck me slightly. I was shocked by his intentional assault , so I raised my voice to confront him about the initial incident. The next thing he did was to try to grab the phone out of my hand as I invited him to apologize to my wife.
The video cut out for a couple of moments. During that time, he raised a shoe to throw at me. He obviously realized that doing so would be a very bad idea, as I would probably pick it up & dunk it in the windshield washing fluid. I resumed video recording and commented about the shoe throwing threat and exclaimed about how much trouble he was in. It sounded so silly after I've reviewed it, but Stephanie loves it. After shutting off video recording again, I told him not to go anywhere, as police were on their way.
My instruction had little weight with him, as he took off shortly thereafter. We didn't call police; we just wrote a detailed email to his company.
I don't intentionally poke at bullies out here, but I do have to admit that I find a thrill in raising my voice in these spontaneous situations. My wife loves that I defend her and seek to push back against wrongdoing.
No comments:
Post a Comment