The Most Frightening Place on Earth

I've been in a LOT of scary places. The restroom at Stuckey's outside of Columbus, ScareHouse, a hospital emergency room, inside a classroom filled with kindergarteners ... lots of scary places. I've found the winner, though. I have decided that the absolute most frightening place on Earth is a high school parking lot at dismissal.

No, really. It's not for the faint of heart.

The first problem is that high school kids think they're invincible, so not a one of them checks for cars before strolling through the lot. They will absolute walk right in front of your moving car and act SUPER annoyed if you nearly hit them because obviously they are the center of the universe and why didn't you know they were walking behind that tall truck? Duh.

The bigger issue, though, is that they SUCK at driving.

It's not surprising given that most of them got their licenses about ten minutes ago. But, like, they could be less obvious about it. I don't actually enjoy playing bumper cars when I happen to be driving my still new enough to be clean car. (That's a whole other story. It turns out that if you threaten your children enough, they will stop completely trashing the back seat.)

But apparently we have to play bumper cars.

I pick Alexis up from school once per week because she is a sad little teen who can't be bothered to figure out how to take the bus from school to work (it's a legitimate route). Which, whatever. It takes about 20 minutes round trip. It's just that 5 of those minutes involve constant near-death experiences.

Today's trip was highlighted by a lovely moment when two cars on opposite sides of the through way decided to both back up at the same time. They seriously both failed to notice that I was driving through and just backed on up, and they did it opposite each other. I saw them in time to stop and back up and then waited patiently to see if they would collide. They noticed each other about 4 inches before they would have to explain themselves to their parents, so yay? Except that they both slammed on their brakes and then JUST SAT THERE. They couldn't figure out how to work through one of them going first or that at least one of them needed to pull back into a parking space or any of it. They just sat there, back ends of their cars 4 inches apart and blocking the only way through the parking lot.

About an eternity later, it finally dawned on one of them to pull forward. The other one resumed backing, but AGAIN didn't look before doing it and came within an inch of hitting a different care. Then he overreacted and lurched forward REALLY quickly, nearly hitting a different car. I wish I had video of the whole thing because it was a comedy of errors that I would watch and re-watch for hours.

For what it's worth, the peanut gallery was already in the car with me and she was narrating the whole thing. She added a bit of commentary like, "He's not the smartest" escalating to, "WHAT A MORON" so that was extra fun.

When I die in that parking lot some day, it's good to know that she'll be ready to provide the play-by-play.