What do you Mean?

So...

I now live in Athens, GA. Home to the illustrious and storied University of Georgia.

As I am a male and as I am now a student again (full-time, I know - what was I thinking?), I chose to purchase a meal plan. Yeah, I basically had a meal plan before, anyway, sponsored by Wendy's, Del Taco, and Alberto's.

Well, this evening the parking garage adjacent to the dining facility was very busy. It almost seems as if there was an REM concert serviced by said garage that let out concurrent with the end of my tasty chicken caesar wrap.

My Jeep happened to be parked in a stall serviced by the lane that was experiencing the traffic issues. "No problem," I thought, "as soon as the cars behind me see the reverse lights on, it will indicate my desire to leave sometime this millennium, and, in a display of that famous southern hospitality, they will allow me to reverse and join the legions of automobiles trying to escape the clutches of this garage."

As with so many other things in life, I was wrong.


The first car was a Volkswagen piloted by a southern belle who, to her credit, would have had to make a split second recognition of the scenario and then slam on the brakes to allow me to exit the stall. Having sisters age 19 and 17, asking for recognition and cognition (the order of which is counter intuitive in this situation... hmmm) in such a short amount of time is a tall order. She gets a pass.

The second was some Volvo-driving academic type. He had plenty of time to evince the courtesy heretofore mentioned and heretofore expected. He white knuckled his way past my efforts to leave, without any equivocation about his determination to get out of that garage at least one car length ahead of me. Jerk.


The third car was the remarkable one. It was a Nissan Sentra from the late 1980s. I'm sure it looked just like this one 20 years ago:

Well, as the woman in the car approached, I started inching my way backward. She saw me, made eye contact with me, and when the opportune moment for her to do the nice thing came along, she looked away, straight forward, and punched the gas. Yeah. I expected that, based on the previous two cars.

The nice group of college-aged kids in the next car waved me in. Kudos go to the driver.

As I reverse and maneuver my Jeep backward to enter the stream of traffic, I notice a litany of bumper stickers on the back of the Sentra in question. These were the garden variety bumper stickers that you might expect to find at a Dukakis for President rally. As my car turned, one bumper sticker in particular seemed as out of place as Dukakis in that tank.

Exhibit A:

Congratulations, Sentra Lady:

Mean Hypocrites Suck Even Worse.