Impromptu Social Experiment:

Last night something happened that has not happened to me before. (Or at least that I can remember) I ran out of gas in the middle of the road. I was on a 4 lane road, 2 lanes in each direction. Luckily I was in the outside lane and was able to pull over as close to the curb as possible. I actually put on my hazards when I saw all my dash lights come on. I would think there would have been a sputter from the engine but NOPE, it was as if my car just fell asleep at the wheel.

Once I got over to the curb, I noticed that there were many cars that would come up on me at a high rate of speed and cut over to the other lane at the last minute. So wanting to be in the safest position possible I figure I would get out of the car, open the hood so they could see there was a disabled car, (thinking they needed more notice then the flashers) and then I stood near the car on the sidewalk.

During my wait for the friend I called for rescue I noticed several things. The main and obvious thing was that there are many inattentive drivers out there. I would say there were four instances of people almost ramming my car at full speed, and countless others tried at a slower speed.

The second observation and sadly somewhat a shocker, I actually had three people stop and ask if I needed help. Granted they stopped in a dangerous manner but stopped none the less. It was a sad shocker to me because I admit I don’t have faith in humanity and didn’t expect anyone to stop at all. Now the Ironic thing is that the one person who I expected to stop didn’t. That person was our lovely law enforcement officer. I would think that as a public servant you would check out any car on the public roads that appeared to be in distress, but alas, that wasn’t the case.

Either way, the situation was handled easily, it was a nice evening and I now know that my gas warning light doesn’t work and that when the needle reaches the big E to fill err up!