Have a Little Patience

As I was driving to work Saturday morning, I was alongside perhaps the most impatient driver I've ever seen.

My commute down New Circle Road is not a long drive and when it's happening around 9 a.m. on a weekend morning, it's even quicker. I usually enjoy my commutes into work on the weekend mornings because I know they there will only be a handful of other cars on the road with me. But on this particular morning, that handful was too many for one driver alongside me.

New Circle is one of the more annoying roads I've ever encountered. It's the main artery through Lexington and it's a circle. I don't know what sort of geometry classes the engineers who designed it took, but in my 9th grade math class I learned the quickest way from one point to another is a straight line. On top of the slow design of the road, half is an expressway type road with a 55 mile per hour speed limit and the other half has a speed limit that is about 10 miles less and every 500 feet there's a stoplight. It's really not conducive to getting somewhere quickly, especially during rush hour.

New Circle is the main stretch of road I take to work and it's the stretch with the extensively stoplights. And believe me, if you hit one red light, you will hit them all. Saturday morning that was the case. As I merged on the road and stopped at the first red light no more than 200 yards later, I noticed a little car speeding up behind me. He turned right while we all sat at the red light. I didn't think twice about it, until I noticed that same little car driving on the other side of the red light. I looked to my right and realized this gentleman had turned right, made an immediate left into a gas station parking lot, then turned right back onto New Circle Road. I giggled to myself and thought he must have somewhere important to get.

Then it just got ridiculous.

At every red light we hit, this guy would turn right, cut through a parking lot, bypass the red light and speed down the road. The silliest part of it was I always caught up to him which means he wasn't gaining any time by his little method of cutting through parking lots to avoid traffic lights. Eventually, I got to my final red light where I turn off to work. That car was turning left too. He made a u-turn and started driving back in the direction we came from. I wish I would have known where he was going. Wherever it was, he had no patience getting there.

I feel like I've gained a lot of patience in the last year or so. I could still use some more and now at the moment I feel like my patience is getting away from me I think if that little car and the driver who thought he was getting where he had to go quickly, but was really just driving out of his way and making up just as much ground as he would if he would have just waited two minutes at the red light like the rest of us.