“The hose is usually long enough and you can avoid the inconsiderate idiots many times.”
Usually not the case on my Taurus which has the filler neck on the pass. side, which can also lead to problems since it seems like most cars have them on drivers side. Even if I could I wouldn’t want to drag that dirty greasy hose across my paint.
When people get behind the wheel, sometimes etiquette goes out the door. The separation we feel when we ride around in a cage makes some people forget their humanity. Etiquette is not the issue. Survival is the issue, especially since you don’t know if this hot-head possessed a gun or how long his wife had been nagging him. The decision is yours; are you going to be the better person and move your car, or are you going roll the dice and get out of the car and start pumping your gas? You may have been in the right, but just how much is being in the right worth to you?
In a situation like this, when you choose to be the better person,
“… you may feel a slight sting. That’s pride [messing] with you. f[orget] pride. Pride only hurts. It never helps …”
-Pulp Fiction
Can you imagine a situation like this, you exert your rights and to heck with the other guy, he can just wait. You are on your way to a job interview, you walk into the office and guess who is sitting there?
Yep, often there are two choices. You can do what you have a right to do, or you can do what will make you feel better afterwards, even if it’s inconvenient at the moment.
Further to Whitey’s comment. I don’t know what part of the country you live in, but in certain places people do have guns. And some have no internal braking system. Remember the story of Angus MacKay, whose tombstone read: “Here lies the body of Angus MacKay, who died defending his right-of-way, his right was clear and the law was strong, but he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.”
I have no sympathy for people who get a big vehicle then never learn how to drive it. Any time I get a new (err.. used..) vehicle, I park it in a parking lot by a few landmarks (a light pole, or another car, or whatever), look around it on the outside, look from the inside, so I can know how big it looks from the inside and how big it *really* is. If I just needed to back up a few inches so I could still gas up, sure. Backing way up, delaying my fuel up, to accomodate someone that has room to leave but just doesn't know how to drive their vehicle? Hell no.
I see people here too, if they don't have room to do one of those useless semi-truck-style turns (swing out to the left to make a right turn) they sit until they have space instead of making a proper turn... they will want to "squeeze by" a car to get to the right or left turn lane but will just sit and look impatient when they have over 2 feet of space on each side of them to do it, because they never learned the size of their vehicle. Jockey the vehicle back and forth like 8 or 9 times to get out of a parking space when it should take maybe 2. And so on. He can suck it up, learn how to drive his vehicle or get a smaller one he can handle, and back up.The problem is the female woman mouthing off in the passenger seat. If she would just learn to shut up, the driver could have gather the composure to back up very carefully. It may take a while but it can be done. Whereas a constant ringing in your ear would make you lose track of what’s at your blind spots. After all, the driver of said huge vehicle had to have backed it up some time that day.
As much as I respect my parents, I always asked them not to talk, especially about how close I’m driving next to an obstacle; I just saw it, I KNOW how close it is, and I don’t need to be reminded of it when I need to look at something else. I had to ask them at least until they learned what I was capable of.