DIY auto repair
A truck driver in China was pulled over this winter when police noticed something odd about his windshield: it was made of cardboard.
One of the main drawbacks of a cardboard windshield is the reduced visibility, so the man was forced to drive with his head sticking out of the side window in order to see. When the freezing conditions got to be too much, he would instead peer through tiny holes punched in the cardboard. When police pulled over the truck and asked the driver to step out, they said his face was purple from the cold.
The driver told the officers that he had been in an accident several days earlier that had smashed his windshield, but he didn’t have time to repair it because of his tight delivery schedule.
Instead he found a large piece of cardboard and made his own replacement. Incredibly, he had been driving under these conditions for 400 miles.
Police escorted the man to a service station to have his truck fixed properly before continuing with his deliveries. They have a hunch that the man was driving a turnip truck and broke his windshield when he fell off of it.
Paying through the nose
A Scottish man received a $95 ticket for blowing his nose behind the wheel, even though his vehicle wasn’t moving at the time.
Michael Mancini found himself stuck in London traffic last October and decided to place his van in park and wipe his nose with a handkerchief. When traffic cleared, he was immediately pulled over by a police officer who had witnessed his brazen display.
So what’s wrong with honking your smeller in a stationary vehicle? The officer felt that Mancini was “not in proper control of his vehicle.”
Some say Mancini is just the latest victim of police officer Stuart Gray, nicknamed “PC Shiny Buttons” for his zealous and sometimes controversial approach to law enforcement.
A few months before ticketing Mancini, Gray made headlines for issuing a $70 ticket for littering to an unemployed man who accidentally dropped a $10 bill in the street as he left a shop.
Regardless, Mancini is refusing to pay the ticket and says he’s willing to take the case to court if necessary.
Driven to distraction
If your husband doesn’t seem interested in talking to you while he’s driving, he may just be trying to keep you safe.
A recent study at the University of Illinois found that driving requires so much brainpower that it’s hard to do anything else well at the same time, including talking about that awful thing that Maxine said to Barb.
Experiments were performed with two subjects sitting in a driving simulator—one acting as a driver and the other as a passenger and conversation partner. They both listened to four brief stories while navigating through busy urban traffic. Afterward they were asked to recall everything they remembered about the stories.
The results showed that the drivers remembered 20% less than passengers, with retention particularly bad while driving through intersections or demanding traffic conditions.
The study concluded that safe driving requires acceptance that other things going on at the same time will suffer. So if that means holding off on a discussion about whether Marlene looked pregnant or just bloated, that’s just a sacrifice that husbands will have to make in the name of public safety. R&B
