I'm the type of person to get all dopey and choked up when the news or whoever does a segment on the firefighters or the police, the "real heroes of our neighborhood," as they're so often portrayed. Which is why it was especially disheartening to realize tonight that it's very possible for these heroes, our firefighters, to be TOTAL DICKS. This should not come as a surprise - they are people, after all, just like all the other people in the world. Some of whom inspire me, some of whom I love, and some of whom I desire to smack with a 2x4.

Tonight I was driving on the freeway, and I needed to change lanes to get out of my exit only lane. There was a lot of traffic, none of it moving exceptionally fast, but it was a decent pace. The flow also contained just enough slowing and speeding up to confuse matters. So I put on my blinker. I looked to my left and there was a fire engine a little behind me, just moseying along with the rest of us. I sped up to get ahead of it, and it lagged behind a little. I saw a gap, and since I'd had my blinker on and was an okay distance in front of it, I thought it was a good time to move. In fact, I thought s/he was letting me in. So I start to move over, with enough room to do so successfully, in fact, when I hear this BLAAAARE of a horn come at me. It freaked me out, because it was so loud and fire engines are huge. I didn't want to take a chance getting mowed over, so I quickly pulled back into the original lane. I waited and adjusted with traffic, and kept peeking over, and the fire engine kept changing pace, not letting me in. It was like any other situation when you find yourself thinking, Let me in, you fucker, stop blocking me! But instead of a typical tiny car with a jerkass driver, it was a gigantic fire engine.

We were stuck in the same pattern of traffic for a bit, and then I noticed quite a large gap to my left. The fire engine had slowed down, and I thought was letting me in. I pulled into the lane to my left, in front of the fire engine, and was just about to chalk it up to a miscommunication or something, when the fire engine driver starts flashing their brights at me.

What a fucking asshole. Seriously.

I don't know why this annoys me so. I run into rude drivers quite often on the Los Angeles freeways. I guess it was just the fact that this enormous automobile seemed to be abusing its presence on the road, combined with the letdown of having a symbol I've always held in high regard suddenly become as petty and annoying as the rest of those who inspire road rage in us all.