Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Left side, strong side

I don't know if its just a matter of having a higher bird to car ratio or if the fowl in Wyoming are just really depressed but over the past year of living here I bet I have hit or run over 10 birds. Some of them I'm sure just didn't realize how fast I was coming. Every once in a while I see those birds that I swear have a death wish and swoop down in front of the car on the highway when I'm going 85. It just kind of stinks when they get stuck in the grill of the truck and I have to pull out the limp corpse and rebuff the Ford logo.

In only a slightly related story, I am beginning to understand how so many deer and the like end up as roadkill. The other day I was walking through a Staples and there was an older gentleman at the far end of the aisle and as luck would have it, exactly where I needed to go. We saw each other the second I turned the corner to enter my beloved pen aisle (I'm a sucker for office supplies, its borderline intervention time...seriously, this is a cry for help!) and there was at least 6 seconds that passed wherein the man could have made a decision about which side of the aisle he would step to let me by. He juked left and then right a couple of times as I held firm to my line on the left side of the aisle. I wasn't playing a game, I was trying to make it easier for him to choose a side. It wasn't until I was standing directly in front of him, close enough to see those stray nose hairs tickling his upper lip that he decided to step to the side. (I would have just walked around but his Walter Payton impression was taking up the whole space.) Long story short, if I were a semi-truck and he were a deer, there would have been a 300 foot stripe down the pen aisle. So I think we should cut the deer a little slack or at least not give humans much more credit for the ability to make a 50/50 decision (outcome unaffected) as to which side to step to in the clutch. It must be a lot harder than it looks.

2 comments:

Brady and Taryn said...

Good point. I hate it when this happens, and it seemed to always happen to me on campus. If University students can't make the decision of left or right at clutch time, then how do we expect deer to.

Anonymous said...

Hi Eric,

Would you please provide your assesment of what he thought your navigational differentiation was?

Thanks.