car passenger etiquette

As I said in my last entry...this will be a little ditty about my ride home from Syracuse. Let's just summarize it as an interesting experience....I drove up to Syracuse by myself, but on the way home...I gave someone a ride who didn't have one. She came up with a group of people, but they were only going back to about an hour from her house and I was going much closer. It made more sense for me to bring her home...and so I was asked if I minded.

Ok...no problem. I don't mind at all. Now, mind you...I would have preferred to be asked beforehand, but since I was driving to the same place, I didn't mind bringing her home at all....at first.

Let's just say this woman didn't have the best car etiquette....and it was raining buckets for the whole ride home. What should have taken no more than 4 hours took me about 6 hours to get home. At times the rain was so hard...and with trucks on the road, I had little to zero visibility.

1. As soon as she got in the car, she started changing all the temp settings...making it hotter than a tin roof in the car. Now, I am a person who prefers to be cold than hot...and so it might have been chilly in the car, but wouldn't it be courteous to ask to change the settings? Plus, with it being so hot...it was making me tired and since I was on the road at 5am, that was a bad idea. So, I did change it back...but told her why I was doing it once the car warmed up.

2. She also immediately started playing with the radio....and once again, didn't ask at all...just started pressing the buttons. And, at one point...I had it set on a station and within minutes she had it changed to something else....mid-song. I would only change the station when the station we were listening to started to get all fuzzy... #2 is compounded by #4...we'll get there.

3. She was telling me how to drive. She doesn't have a license...and well, isn't driving. And she was telling me to be more aggressive than I wanted to be. She is telling me to honk my horn at someone, to pass someone out of my lane, etc. And when we were coming home in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic...she is telling me I should weave in between lanes...in order to get a little ahead. At one point...I told her early on that I would handle it, etc...but it didn't seem to sink in.

4. Well, she was all over the radio...picking her station, but she also fell asleep for most of the trip. It was a difficult drive...pouring rain for the whole time and over two hours of it was spent listening to her snore LOUDLY! I would cough from time to time to wake her up...and she would be snoring again within minutes. One, when you are riding with someone and the conditions are intense...I tend to stay awake to keep the person company...and to just stay awake. Plus, the snoring was incredibly distracting...and personally, snoring drives me nuts. And finally...why did she need to keep changing the radio...which she would do in between waking up...if she was going to sleep during the whole thing. I finally put in a CD...which seems to curb the radio changing behavior.

5. Now this isn't her fault...but well, still annoying. She has a cold, so she spent all her awake time coughing up a lung and NOT COVERING her mouth. I had a clean, germ free car on the way up...and on the way back...I got a snoring, coughing, radio changing passenger. and this morning...my throat is starting to hurt.

And the sad thing is...this woman just didn't know any better...or that is how it seemed. She seemed like a nice woman...with just really horrible car etiquette.

And how was your friday evening?