Parking lot rage

For the next 2 days I'll be hangin' with my girlies. (Using vacation rather than paying for a whole week of childcare when they'll only use 2 days. School starts on Wednesday.) I had to run into work for a couple of hours this morning to get the guys going because the foreman is off too. On my way out I stopped by the gas station to get a cup of coffee. This gas station is one of those that have all the pumps in front of the parking spots at the store. So you could drive through the pumps to get to the store, but I don't think that's the safest thing and since there were more than a couple of people getting gas, I started to drive around the side. As I drove around, a lady was leaving the pumps and drove in front of me, between the pumps and the parking spaces. I stopped and it seems I stopped a little to quickly for her taste. I wasn't going very fast, there was almost 2 car lengths between us and no real danger of us colliding, but she looked right at me, gave me this disgusted look, and started telling me what she thought. I couldn't hear her, but her facial expression made it pretty obvious what the topic of conversation was.


I wasn't angry at all. I thought it was hilarious. She didn't look at me after the initial glance, but she would have seen me laughing if she had.

It reminded me of another encounter I had like that. Years ago in the parking lot of a mall during the Christmas shopping season, I was pulling into the lot while a young lady in this big Chevy truck was pulling out. (You know, one of those trucks that indicate some sort of overcompensation.) She had to make a really wide turn, crossing all the way through my lane. I slowed down and gave her plenty of room, but I also lifted my hand up off the steering wheel. (I don't remember why.) Apparently she took that as some sort of angry gesture on my part and practically exploded. She was waving her arms around and obviously yelling. I think she even scared her passenger.

That was one of those situations where I wish I could have gone back and apologized. She was obviously stressed, Christmas shopping probably played a large part in that, and I felt really bad for adding to it. Of course it was unintentional, but at that point her perception was her reality and I felt bad for making her reality any worse. The encounter today wasn't nearly that bad. Today, the lady's reaction was so over the top for the situation that I think it had little to do with me.

And yet it's all another one of those continuing life lessons. How people perceive what I do is almost more important than what I actually do. I say 'almost' because I really only have control over what I do, not over how they perceive it.

“We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.” - Anais Nun