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One in Three Men Fear Female Drivers


We went into Edmonton Thursday night to see Doug Stanhope at New City.

Due to the continuing medical restrictions on Rob’s activities, I drove, which makes for tense travel under optimal conditions, but as I was driving his vehicle instead of my Avalanche and negotiating an area of the city I’ve never driven, it was particular fun.

And by “fun”, I mean not in the least bit.

Earlier in the day I caught the tail end of a conversation between two of the NOW radio deejays about a recent survey on men’s perceptions of female driving. The female they live with specifically. The results revealed that one in three actually feared for their safety, if not lives, when their women were behind the wheel.

The survey included 3,000 men and in addition to their uncontrollable fright, they shared the following hard to completely believe tidbits:

  • 1 in 10 has grabbed the wheel to prevent an accident
  • 1 in 5 find it impossible to fully relax
  • nearly all considered their driving abilities superior
  • 1 in 5 couples have argued over her driving skills
  • 1 in 10 men have asked their wives to pull over so they can drive

What specifically do men object to or feel may contribute to their premature death and/or dismemberment?

They believe that women don’t concentrate and are easily distracted from the task of driving by … everything. They also are sure that they possess a superior ability to assess conditions and react in a more timely manner.

And what are women drivers’ chief offenses?

TOP TEN COMPLAINTS ABOUT WOMEN’S DRIVING

1. Lack of concentration

2. Braking too late

3. Flicking the accelerator

4. Not avoiding rumble strips

5. Getting too close to other cars

6. Braking too hard

7. Fiddling with the stereo

8. Failure to indicate

9. Going too fast

10. Sticking in the middle lane

Four and ten I found particularly ridiculous.

I have never encountered a rumble strip that it was possible to avoid without driving on the shoulder, which in Alberta – don’t exist generally – and back in Iowa were gravel.

And the middle lane? That I don’t get. On the interstate I drove regularly back in the commuter days, the far right lane was for exiting and entrancing. People who rode that lane basically gummed up the works, making it harder to get on and impossible to exit during rush hour because no one will let you in as they inch towards work or home.

The far left was considered the “fast lane” though how there can be such a thing when the maximum speed limit is the same regardless of lane, I never understood.

What I discovered is that no matter what lane you are in, somebody – usually a guy – will get cheesed off because … he has entitlement issues and/or disillusions of superior driving skills.

I’ve had two husbands now (and a father), who have all held my driving skills in low esteem, and I’ll admit that I don’t/didn’t drive well with any one of them riding shotgun – mostly because I know I am being evaluated and found wanting, which unsurprisingly makes the whole driving process even more joyless.

In the Jalopnik article referring to the poll, one of the commenters made an excellent point. Driving skill is often related to the level of love the driver holds for driving.

Certainly I have rarely loved driving.

Rob regards it as a game and began driving at age eleven. At one point he drove semi when he was working the oil fields and driving was part of his job later on as a field operator.

My late husband took great pride in his ability to drive and his vehicles and was devastated when his illness effectively grounded him. Before he lost his sight however, he drove a cube van on a delivery route.

My father (and my mother too) grew up on a farm. He mastered all modes of transport at a young age and during his years after being discharged from the Navy in the late forties, road-tripped with his brother all over the west.

Since first getting my license, an arduous process that involved put myself under the microscope of my father to a point where I would actively avoid opportunities to practice driving, I was a chauffeur.

First among my friends with a license and liberal access to wheels, I ferried us about on weekends and over the summer. My new skill freed my parents to dump as many of their transportation duties on me as they could get away with as I became a taxi service for my siblings.

In university though I lived a blissful three years without driving, bumming rides if I needed them but mainly walking. I avoided even the college transit system for the most part. But student teaching and living off campus eventually put an end to my carefree days and when I moved away for my first teaching job to a city where cars were a necessary evil, I spent the next decade or so commuting with the masses.

Driving has always been a task. No different from recycling and or mowing the lawn. I happily abandon the driver’s seat to anyone who wants it more, so I think the “love of driving” comment makes a lot of sense.

Rob isn’t allowed to drive for another three weeks. Precaution and also provincial regulation. Not any different in the states really. Will’s best friend’s wife is an epileptic and she was forever being put on driving restrictions after seizures though she seldom abided by them for long.

The ride home after Doug Stanhope (which was an experience) was a bit harrowing. I am very light-sensitive. Headlights dang near blind me – more now than when I was younger though. So between the glare, the rain and the unfamiliar dash, I white-knuckled to the point where Rob suggested that I pull over and let him drive.

When we got home, I switched back to my truck to drive the babysitter home and all was well again, and a lesson was learned by all.

Well, I learned a lesson at any rate – and I made an appointment with the eye doctor. According to Rob you can get tinted glasses to deal with glare for night driving, who knew? I’ve been complaining to eye docs for years about the glare and halo effect I get at night*.

Heart attacks are growth experiences even when you didn’t have one yourself.

* No, I don’t have glaucoma. My pressure is fine. I have always seen halos and am just incredibly photosensitive. It’s worse at night only because the general darkness means my pupil is open wider and reacts more strongly to the spotlight effect of headlights and sudden changes from very dark to bright lights.

Sarah Palin or Shakespeare? Sometimes it’s Hard to Tell.


Sarah Palin committed a bush in a recent Twitter battle cry to New Yorkers calling them to “refudiate” plans to build a mosque close to the 9/11 site.

“Refudiate” is, of course, not a real word in the same that “normalcy” was not a real word until President Warren G. Harding coined it a hundred years ago – give or take.

The offense against the American version of the English language was quickly seized upon by those who (quite rightly) fear Palin and held it up as proof of her already rather obvious lack of dexterity with a language we can only assume she’s been speaking since toddlerhood.

Although malapropisms out of the mouths of political leaders actual and wanna be are disheartening, out of the mouth of Palin, it’s not worth a footnote much less a bloggy storm.

What’s really eye-opening came on the heels of Mama Sarah’s predictable inability to be chagrined.

“Shakespeare liked to coin words too.” she twittered back at the elitist blogosphere.

And indeed he did.

All that glitters is not gold. As (good) luck would have it. Household words. Cold comfort. In a pickle. Devil incarnate. Eaten me out of house and home. For goodness sake. Give the devil his due. Heart of gold. Laughing stock. It was Greek to me. Naked truth. Wild goose chase.

What amazes me and seems to have sailed past everyone’s offended ears is that Sarah Palin knows that Shakespeare coined words and phrases that previously didn’t exist in the English language.

And I will concede that it’s very possible that her little Twuip was as ghostwritten as her book, but it was clever, and it’s past time her critics realized that she cannot be mocked and jeered away.

First, because Palin doesn’t blush unless it will serve a greater purpose.

Second, she has a gift for turning faux pas into the “aw shucks, I’m just folk like you ordinary people”. She spins her legend from the ridicule and frustrated rants of the left and the few on the right who see the damage she is doing to their politics – such as they are.

Refudiate? I think ole Will could have done better. The things that man could have done with a Twitter stream should leaving us weeping over the drivel that reigns as literary there now.

It’s not the worst thing she’s uttered in any medium, but it’s important to remember that she can’t be taken down by trivial nit-picking. She feeds on that like Nosferatu on village virgins.

Substance, people. She doesn’t have any. Criticism of her should.

Overheard at The Royal Alex


While I was kept waiting to see Rob (the wing had shut for quiet hours just before he was brought to the Cardiac ward (unit 24 room 14 – in case you should ever need the information yourself – god forbid), I witnessed a couple of medical dramas not my own by the elevator.

The first was a heated exchange between a tall dark-haired man in his late forties or early fifties, flanked by two equally gangly mop-headed late teens who looked at their boat sized feet most of the time and hid behind hair that obscured the top halves of their faces, and a nearly as tall woman who, judging from the badge, was some sort of social worker.

She was imploring the man to return and complete a test that “absolutely saves lives”, and it was then that I noticed the tell-tale wristband, marking him as an escapee.

He had a duffel that he gripped like an ax handle and sent both boys and woman into hasty retreat when in his agitation he began gesticulating with it.

“I’m hungry, ” he told her. “Don’t you understand. I haven’t eaten for a day and a half and they are telling me that a test I should have had 3 and a 1/2 hours ago is still another 3 to 4 hour wait.”

“Emergencies come up,” the woman countered. “I’m sure you understand.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. This is ridiculous. There’s no reason why I should have to wait without eating for two days for a test that just a screening.”

“It’s a life-saving screening,” she corrected him.

“I’m done,” he said, hitting the elevator call button.

“What if you develop cancer, ” she pulls out the big gun. Cancer is a huge gun. I’ve had it pulled on me as I am adamant about the useless nature of mammograms before menopause for the majority of women. Health care professionals like to use fear even in the face of statistics.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he strains this through his teeth and turns to the opening elevator and barely restrains himself from clocking the broad as she hits the button causing the doors to close his face.

“You don’t know that,” she says with the smugness of someone who knows she will win an argument based on the fact that her point can’t be proven false unless her opponent submits to her will.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” he motions to the boys who shrug at the woman, whose dumbfounded look says she can’t believe that her normal browbeating tactics have failed.

He stalks to the stairs with boys slouching behind him and she follows like an avenging angel.

It’s only later, when the man and the boys re-materialize and I catch a bit more of the dialogue between them that I realize he was here to have the routine colonoscopy that’s forced on everyone when they hit fifty regardless of personal statistics.

I don’t know if the guy escaped for good, but he did look less cranky, so perhaps he’d eaten at any rate.

Not long after, another 50 something gentleman in a leather jacket emerged from Unit 24, fingers clamped to his wrist and looking a bit harried. I could make out blood and remembering Rob’s angio clamp on his wrist, I quickly guessed that this guy’d had one too but was being released stentless.

He hovered about the elevator. Agitated and peeking beneath his reddening fingers and looking about as though expecting to see hospital personnel coming to his rescue.

Mostly who you see in the unit halls of the Royal Alex are housekeeping staff though I am not sure what they clean. Rob reported that in the 18 or so hours he spent in room 14, he never saw housekeeping do more than empty the trash baskets.

“Can you bring me a clean pair of socks when you pick me up on Saturday, ” he told me on the phone Friday night. “The washroom floor is sticky with urine and my socks are gross.”

Later he told me that the nurses dumped the bedpans in the room’s only toilet.

“I think they toss the contents at the toilet from the doorway.”

Leather Jacket was definitely in a panic by the time the hapless cardiac resident emerged from the elevator. I would see this same doctor later in Rob’s room. He shuffled through a stack of files and practically ran over Leather Jacket, who clearly recognized him and thrust his self-clamped oozing wrist in the junior cardiologist’s face.

Junior’s expression? Aw, fuck.

“It won’t stop bleeding,” Leather Jacket. “What do I do?”

At the Royal Alex, they try to go into the heart through the main artery accessed at the wrist instead of going through at the groin. Part of the reason is that the incision at the wrist closes faster, requiring a 2 to 4 hour period of tight clamping and immobilization as opposes to the 4 to 6 hours of lying flat on the back with the groin. Turnover clearly being the goal.

Leather Jacket was turned-over a bit prematurely.

Junior Heartman tried to fob the guy off, but he was persistent in his fright, so the doc sat him down and patiently explained that Leather Jacket needed to keep the pressure on for a few more hours and all would be well.

And if not, he should stop by the ER.

At this Leather Jacket began peppering Junior with questions while Junior nodded and made polite vocalizations. He was busy flipping through charts and really was just waiting for Leather Jacket to calm down, catch a clue and then an elevator.

When I told the story to Rob on Monday, he remembered Leather Jacket too. He’d burst into room 14 in search of a nurse before I’d even seen him.

The nurse admonished him.

“I can’t be checking you. You’ve been discharged. Go to the emergency room.”

But after a bit of whining, she tightened his clamp a bit and sent him down the hall – where I would see him.

The incision at the wrist is not stitched closed but merely tightly clamped. I am not certain how people on blood thinners manage to clot the hole in a major artery closed, but they do – provided the clamp doesn’t come loose too soon.

I haven’t heard any tales of dead men in leather jackets being found in the Royal Alex parkade, so I will assume that all’s well that ended well for him, or that he spent 7 or 8 hours in the ER.