It should be illegal for one to simultaneously drive a motor vehicle and gab on a cellular telephone. I arrived at this conclusion after I was forced to venture to an Ikea store outside Seattle. After spending several days perusing the home décor aisles of Eugene stores, I came to the conclusion that this city has a complete and utter lack of high-quality modular storage solutions for my contemporary lifestyle, forcing me to traverse to greener pastures.
This required a road trip along the straight and wide expanse that is Interstate 5, whose panoramic views of pastures, grass-seed farms and rolling hills are about as interesting as this column. But take heart, for although the drive took four-and-a-half hours, this article probably won’t be any longer than 20 inches.
For those of you who have never experienced Ikea, it is truly something to behold. An entire warehouse showroom separated off into little mock-living areas filled with furniture, decorations and accessories that no one could possibly know how to pronounce, such as Tromsnes, Poäng and Jonglör.
As the afternoon wore on and my shopping cart filled with more and more fabulous knick-knacks, my thoughts turned to the splendor and beauty of Jack’s apartment in the movie “Fight Club,” prior to the explosion that either blasted all the furniture into a thousand pieces or fused it all together into one giant, smoldering Swedish lump. Sure, the entire purpose of the apartment scene was to expose the way that material possessions define the life of their owner, but didn’t you marvel at the simplicity of the clean lines, modular designs and contemporary style?
Like Ed Norton’s character, I don’t want to be defined by my Omar storage unit, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t put my damned clothes in it. It does fit perfectly in my room and complements my existing theme quite well, after all.
For those of you who started reading this article because you are interested in cell-phone usage, I am getting there, so bear with me. On the drive home, the back of my car stuffed with ready-to-assemble furniture and white plastic bags printed with the blue-and-yellow Ikea logo, I was nearly run off the road, not once, but twice, by inconsiderate motorists who decided their telephone conversations were obviously more important than, say, paying attention to the road or the car (mine) in the lane next to them.
The first person who nearly killed me was a man who looked to be in his mid-40s. I tried to justify his rudeness by telling myself things such as: “It’s probably his sick child calling from the hospital,” or “It’s his wife, asking for a divorce.”
The second person who nearly ran me off the road was a teenage girl. I didn’t even try to justify her rudeness. She was so immersed in her conversation that she was using her arms to gesture about wildly instead of using them to maintain control of her car.
Now, this is not the first time that such events have nearly cost me my life, but it was the first time that said events had threatened to turn my Ikea products into a smoldering Swedish lump à la “Fight Club” (just kidding). These events merely stick in my mind because they are the most recent.
Now, I don’t mean to generalize, but I can say from personal experience that I have difficulty carrying on a telephone conversation and doing anything else. I can accuse many of my friends of this same incompetence. I can also attest to my sister’s inability to speak and function, as she nearly burned our house down while gabbing with a friend during her teen years.
It just seems to me that something as potentially dangerous as driving, especially when you factor in the momentum of modern sport utility vehicles, should require the full attention of the driver. Gabbing on a cell phone creates an unnecessary distraction that could result in a fatal accident for the driver, the driver’s passengers or any number of innocent bystanders such as myself.