"Dum dee da dum....." Sheldon Pratt hummed away. "Ah- another early morning! Looks to be a beautiful day! I shall as always take full advantage!
And so Sheldon did. Soooo productive was he. Why, by seven o'clock he had already enjoyed most of his morning routine and was almost ready to set out on the road.
Meanwhile, across town, Barry Tarkanian was oversleeping, as usual. Up too late the night before, he was suddenly roused out of sleep by his alarm. "Turn that damn thing off!" his father yelled, for Barry's alarm was set to the local rap station. "I don't know how you can stand to listen to that" his mother echoed, but Barry wasn't listening. He'd been living at home after a brief foray out into the world, and even though he was now 25, so what? His parents could deal with it!
Sheldon Pratt, meanwhile, was busy assembling his lunch. His lunch container, sort of a largish cube, presented him with a spatial puzzle which he delighted in solving. "I'll put this container in like this, and this other one in sideways. Yes, that fits. A little snack in this container, this one on top of that, and voila!" The lunchbox was perfectly packed and filled with a delightful array of tastes.
Do you have what it takes- to commute?
David Armstrong- Unsplash.com
Over at the Tarkanian house, Barry was rapidly throwing on the same clothes he'd worn for days for he was in danger of being late to work for the third time this month. Lunch was going to be something he'd pick up at the the Quick Stop, where he also had to get gas because he had put doing that off yesterday and now the gauge was near E.
Sheldon, over at his digs, had a good half hour left before it was time to leave the house for his job. He could leave now, he thought, but getting to work early was almost an embarrassment, a pattern that his coworkers had noticed and commented on many times. Better to wait some. "Ah, I shall see if anything new is on the news! There's always time to surf the internet for the latest"
Barry, on the other hand, rarely read the news and could have cared less about the goings on in the world. Wasn't his thing. He was heading out to climb into his truck but his dumb parents asked him, on his way out, if he could bring something in out of the garage first, something that was hard to get to because a lot of the stuff that he had stored in there was blocking it.
By the time Barry was done with that, Sheldon had departed his abode and was lollygagging down the lane, enjoying his commute to work, looking at this and that, and sticking religiously to the speed limit. Not that he didn't have issues with the limit and whoever set it, because he did in places here and there, but mainly he just accepted it because it wasn’t that much of a bother and he wasn't the kind to ever be in a rush- though there were times when even he, super-organized Sheldon Pratt, found himself pressed for time.
Barry, though, was the kind to always be pressed for time. His stupid chore done, he lurched out of his driveway and tore off down the road, quickly coming up behind a car that was going slower than he could stand. He wasn't going to let his displeasure at this go unnoticed so he made sure that the offending car in front of him knew it.
Sheldon was singing along to the radio when all of a sudden he looked up and saw nothing but grill in his rear view mirror. Oh, he'd seen the vehicle approaching, he was never caught unaware, but this one had come up faster than they normally did and was riding snug as a bug on his back bumper. This heightened the degree of danger, and brought with it an equal amount of accompanying tension, which caused a rise in Sheldon’s formerly serene brow. There was no place to pull over, but why should he? it was a pickup truck behind him, not a cop car! Yet, the driver behind him would not relent.
Barry stayed tight on the tail of the jerk in front of him. It was a two lane road full of curves so passing was possible, but dicey. "C'mon, c'mon! Move it!" he growled, while turning up the rap music.
"Thump thump thump" came a driving beat, and nothing now but upper grill and even hood ornament, which he could read, could Sheldon see in his rear view. Yikes! A Frickin’ Crazy Person! The guy behind Sheldon appeared to be growing increasingly agitated, and was now swerving a little right and left. "Ugh!" Sheldon groaned. Why did his commute sometimes have to be this way? He'd flipped guys like this off before and regretted it, he'd tapped the brakes and regretted that too because those kinds of actions only escalated things. The safe play in this situation, always, was to hit the shoulder and wave 'em on by but he was almost to the four lane. "Can I stave this jerk off until then?" Sheldon wondered, calculating time and distance to relief, for he wasn’t in the mood to concede today.
Barry had by then been joined by three others, Mikey, Adam, and Shelia, all of them 'late' and needing to drive to wherever it was that they were going as if lives depended on it.
By then the right turn to the four lane was in sight. Sheldon had made it! Hurray! And not only that, he had a green light too so he simply juked onto the four lane, but stuck tight to the right one. Sure enough, Barry wasted no time in roaring past him. Mikey, Adam, and Shelia left him in the dust too, which seemed to give them pleasure, but the greater pleasure was in Sheldon's seeing all four of them go, especially ringleader Barry.
"Adios, left laners!" Sheldon happily crowed. "Enjoy your left lane day! And now that you're gone, I can get back to thoroughly enjoying mine!", which he did. Dozens and dozens of vehicles containing tense drivers just had to get past him during the rest of his commute to work, just had to get in front of him. The usual.
"Do left laners ever experience the joy of driving?" Sheldon wondered at one point along his dilly-dallying way, but he quickly dismissed that as a trifling thought. "Ahh, doesn't matter. All I know is I'm enjoying mine!”.