Tuesday

The ride today reinforced my perception that couriers are mainly mindless wankers. Men in vans are arrogant fuckfaces. Couriers in vans.... well, you get the drift.

I was cruising down a section of road when I noticed a dirty great big crane parked in the middle of my lane up ahead. It was one of those road transportable cranes that can lift umpteen tonnes onto the fifth floor of a building - that sort of thing. Since it was blocking half the road, there was a traffic control bloke standing there with the usual 'stop/slow' sign.

The courier in the van in front of me was in no mood to either slow down or stop. He completely ignored the traffic bloke and crossed the double white line to go around him. The traffic bloke ran to his left, waving his sign at the van. In the end, the only way he got the van to stop was to stick the sign out horizontally at windscreen level, threatening the van with some expensive damage if it didn't halt immediately.

The traffic bloke then proceeded to give the courier a mouthful, and pointed at the driver to get his van back onto the correct side of the road - because just ahead of us was a blind corner, and a big truck was coming our way around the corner. If the courier had continued on his merry way, he would have had a choice of smashing head first into the much bigger truck, or continuing straight on into the display window of the shop on the corner. It was a close run thing, and it gave me a chuckle.

Personally, if a courier or two went up in a fireball once a day, I would not weep.

The legs held up well today with only a few minor aches, although I noticed that whereas I could cruise along Hickson St at 40km/h yesterday, I was hard pressed to do 32km/h this morning. The recuperative effects of a weekend layoff are quite considerable.

I was also briefly stuck behind a late 1980s Corolla. Boy, the exhaust from that thing stank. I spend a lot of time breathing deeply in traffic, and I never notice the exhaust from modern cars - all those catalytic converters and electronic gee-whizzery have really cleaned then up. It's only when you get stuck behind a 1970s or 1980s stinkpot that you realise how far engineering R&D has brought us. When I hear the Climate Change Monkeys of Doom shouting about how we are all going to hell in a handbasket, I am reminded that nerdy men in white coats with unfashionable glasses will come up with a solution that does not involve carbon taxes, lentils and wind farms.

We must place our trust in the nerds.