I was going to write a thoughtful piece on merging behaviour under different traffic conditions–a subject I’ve had ample exposure to over the last few weeks–and I still might, sometime. This week, though, what life allowed was the discovery of two more accidental faces in hospital bathrooms:
- One (on an import – my own rain jacket) that reminds me of The Scream or Home Alone.
- One (on the sink infrastructure) that reminds me of a moose or (rein)deer.
The resident moose is wonderful.
Better warn the nurses there is a moose on the loose!!
Jim R – 🙂 I find that there is little sense of humour in this profession – although more in the nurses than in the doctors in my experience. I think I’ll keep the whimsy to myself. (at least until I’m on my way out the door.)
They hover among us…
Barbara – 🙂 As long as they’re not sneakin’ around . . .
I can’t believe how much they follow you around.
Tom
Tom – All I can say is, don’t look back. They’re EVERYWHERE.
The Scream is impressive. You must be gifted to lift those facial contours from parts that fall into position temporarily! The moose, on the other hand (or hands), is right under our noses often, so shame on us for not recognizing that accidental sculpture.
Laurna – Well, thank you, but all the counting is on the one side, isn’t it? The faces I see, not the faces I miss, I mean. I think I’ve gotten better at it by doing it – I think of it as training my subconscious but who knows what’s really going on? My subconscious, maybe, and she’s not talking! 🙂
Isabel – my comment is not about the faces, but about Ottawa traffic. Is it just my imagination, or do the drivers in Ottawa seem to be in a bigger hurry and less polite when merging now that the civil servants are required to be back downtown and work out of their office 3 days a week.
John – I don’t have a point of comparison for rush-hour traffic, since for the last 10 years of my work life I usually worked from home. I expect there are lots of studies showing the effect of load on driver behaviour, but in my limited experience, each city also develops its own unique style. Ottawans have been “cutter-inners” since I was here briefly in 1975, at least compared to Edmonton drivers.
<> Definitely true.
In Winnipeg, the norm was to enter intersections on amber lights when I lived there in the ’70’s. If you approached an intersection knowing the light was about to turn amber, you didn’t slow down, because the guy behind you was going to go through the intersection on the amber, or maybe the following red.
In Chicoutimi when I was there for a 3-week construction project in the 70’s, drivers would jump the red light in anticipation of the coming green and be a third of the way through the intersection before the light turned green.
Often made me wonder what would happen if you combined the two.
BTW – your faucet face reminds me of a type of common African antelope, but I can’t put s name to the species.
I was told that in Germany the approved method to merge is called the zipper.
You are suppoed to stay in your lane until near the end at which time there is to be an orderly merge of one-by-one. Sure sounds like a good/effective procedure.
Another interesting point was that is Germany, and in Newfoundland, it is the left lane, the passing lane, that gets terminated in the merge. Seems to me that I even saw a stop sign on that lane somewhere.
Everywhere is different.
Barry – Trust the Germans to have developed the optimal method – it sure makes sense. Instead, we feel (OK, I feel) that I’m having to rely on a stranger’s goodwill to let me into their lane. It’s like we don’t have any agreed protocol.