Do you cross the line?

June 26, 2009

The other night I was at a social-media conference in Boston. After that event I wandered over to a networking event where they had set up RockBand.

If you’re not familiar with this arcade-style game, it allows a bunch of participants to actually pretend they’re a rock band. Two people can play guitars, one can play drums and one can sing. I think it allows for more people on stage too, but I’m so musically inept that I lost track at three.

Well, we gathered a few of us onstage and chose a song by Johnny Cash. It was Ring of Fire.

With me on vocals we barely got away without being booed off stage, but that’s not the point. Since I had been thinking of Johnny Cash I was drawn to his I Walk The Line song. And when I thought of lines I thought of how infrequently I see drivers pull up to a stop line.

Seriously.

When’s the last time you looked beside you at a light (or, horrors, in front of you) and were satisfied that all vehicles had come to a perfectly lined-up stop at the stop line?

The state and town have done us a favor by painting these lines in fluorescent paint and putting signs up with arrows to tell us where the stop line is, but people still don’t obey?

In fact, today I was riding though Hingham on 3A and stopped at the light by the Shipyard. The car next to me had in it a guy smoking a cigar and doing his best to hide his stop-line aversion. How do I know that?

He stopped shy of the line by three car lengths!

Then you have people who roll past the line and nearly into the intersection making it impossible for a pedestrian to stay in the crosswalk unless they open the rear doors of the car and stagger through the car to the other side.

What is the world coming to is people can’t even stop at a light?

Are you one of the maniacs who drives faster than 15MPH in downtown Hingham and never stops perfectly at the line? Do you also text while you drive and park in more than one spot at the Derby Shoppes?

Whoops, sorry for the rant. I guess all this rain has made me a little annoyed at being cooped up. I didn’t mean to cross the line.

More to come…