::the open end::

 

Forget teenagers behind the wheel, urban Harley riders, or drug lords in Cadillacs. Moms driving minivans are the biggest menace on the roads today.

Do you have this strange phenomenon in your neighborhoods? If you do, every weekday around 8 o’clock in the morning and at 3:30 in the afternoon, my advice is that you stay inside your house, lock your doors, pull the blinds, and unplug your phone. Why? Because suburban moms are delivering and picking up their little cherubs from school and god help you if you’re caught driving in front of one. Consider yourself warned. Friday, I almost got run off the road.

The craziness happens when school is out. With a cell phone in one hand and the other gripping the wheel, moms in minivans cruise down normally quiet side streets at about 105 miles per hour with their vans crammed full of kids all under the age of 13. Their feet never leave the accelerator. If you happen to catch a glimpse of the moms in your rear-view, my suggestion is that you don’t make a lot of obvious eye contact. You don’t know what could set them off and you don’t want to know. You’ll also notice that the moms’ faces are crazed, sometimes haggard, always angry, but usually well hidden behind a pair of black sunglasses. Their lips will be flapping nonstop against their cell phones too, presumably to other frazzled moms in the other minivans like they’re coordinating the immediate colonization of some distant planet. My advice? Pull over and let them pass.

Even though their minivans sport endearing stickers like Precious Cargo Inside and Baby on Board, the moms usually drive within an eyelash of your rear bumper, ready to rear end you to Hell if you don’t floor the accelerator as soon as the light turns green or if you wait one millisecond too long at a stop sign. And you know those School Crossing signs posted outside elementary schools that caution drivers to slow down? The ones where you’ll get a $500 fine if you’re caught driving more than five miles per hour through a school zone? Well, apparently those warnings don’t apply to moms in minivans because I’ve seen plenty of them blow right through those school zones like they’re not even there. They must have some type of secret immunity agreement with the city police or something.

Side note: I’ll write a post another day about kids who need to be driven everywhere, even when they live only a few blocks from a school because, let’s face it, that’s royally annoying too. I seem to recall asking my mom for a ride to school once when I was a kid and she 1) laughed at me and 2) said, “Why did we get you a bike for Christmas?”

I’m sure that when moms in minivans are not in the middle of kid pickup/delivery, they’re very sweet, kind people. Right? They’re moms. They have to be. Still, all I know is that if we ever want to find Osama Bin Laden, send suburban moms in their assault minivans to the caves of Pakistan or Afghanistan or whatever hole the coward is living under. The moms would find that scumbag in an afternoon—just as long as the hunt didn’t conflict with their pickup/delivery times at the elementary schools.

::Writer X also writes at The 100 Most Annoying Things::

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