Driving Out-of-body in “the Cell Phone Lane”
I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that people talking on their cell phones while driving on the highway prefer the far left lane.
I do tend to look for patterns in things, so it didn’t take long for me to discover that when someone is doing 10 or 20 miles an hour under the speed limit in what is traditionally considered the “fast lane” or the “express lane,” more often than not, they are talking on the cell phone.
Then I began to notice something even stranger: cars in the “slow lane” on the far right would suddenly careen left across 2, 3 or even 4 lanes for no apparent reason.
I saw no slowpokes in front of them that they needed to go around. And even if there had been, there were no other cars in the adjacent lane to keep them from scooting over just one lane to pass. I saw no debris on the road to be avoided, no left-hand exits, and no exit-only right lanes that would cause these drivers to abruptly vacate their cozy little spots in the pokey lane.
What I did notice, whenever a car suddenly went skiing from the far right to the far left lane in front of me, is that, in every single case, the driver was talking on the cell phone. I have to assume that the pokey driver in the right lane received a phone call just prior to that rather reckless maneuver, and for some reason felt the need or instinct to cut across in front of numerous faster-moving vehicles in order to get to that cherished left-hand lane.
But why? The more I thought about it the more it made some kind of wacky sense.
When people are talking on the phone, their brains focus not on the road but on a mental picture of the person they are talking to, and perhaps even the environment that person is calling from. Effectively, the recipient of that call has now left his or her body.
As I understand it, in any out-of-body experience, the traveler maintains a thin umbilical to the corporeal body, in case there’s a fire or some medical emergency that needs to be tended to back at the ranch.
But the vacated corporeal shell body is in a kind of low-power state during this experience and can’t handle too many tasks. So it looks for a place where it can perform basic functions with a minimum of demands and distractions.
The far left lane is perfect for that.
In the slow/right lane, cars are constantly getting on and off at ramps and exits. And it is the slow lane after all: some drivers may be going even slower than the shell body wants to go and would necessitate passing. Many highways have disappearing right lanes, designated for exiting only. In some places, highway lanes branch off onto different highways. Getting stuck in one of these could short out the basic circuitry of the shell body.
Even discounting those rare left exits and leftward-splitting branches, the far left lane constitutes the safest, least mentally challenging option.
And the shell body is unlikely to come up behind another vehicle going slower than it wants to go in the left lane (unless it’s another cell-phone-talking driver’s shell in the car ahead). Drivers who want to go faster simply pass and go around, waving their special swear fingers out the window, unnoticed by the shell driver who is unaware that its vehicle is preventing dozens or hundreds of other cars from reaching (or exceeding) the permitted speeds.
Aside from the dangerous skating across multiple lanes of traffic to get there, the left lane really is the safest place for out-of-body vehicles. For this reason, I suggest we make it official. Designate the far left lane in any multi-lane road as “the cell phone lane.”
Or maybe we should broaden the designation to “the brainless lane,” or the “unguided missile lane,” or the “weapons of mass distruction lane,” to also accommodate people reading their folded up newspapers over the steering wheel, women putting on mascara, and couples having lap sex…in vehicles where cell phones also lurk, waiting like time bombs to go off at any moment and throw the entire balance of the universe off kilter.
Perhaps we should take all you socially and environmentally responsible drivers out of those snug little concrete-walled chutes we call HOV lanes and put the out-of-body vehicles in those. Maybe we could line the barriers on either side with pillows or at least old rubber tires so the shell people don’t even have to steer; they can just keep that right foot on the gas until a brain shows up.
The only challenge that remains is getting those virtually unoccupied vehicles into the brain-dead lane without killing their drivers and others in the process. That’s a much tricker matter.
Suggestions anyone?
