Mr. X and His Driving Trick

Finding success as either a stand-up comedian or as any form of obnoxious ass requires very nearly the same dedication to detail and timing.  A while back, I wrote about a certain Mr. X.   Mr. X had invented a rather unhandy electrical trick in which he purposely shorted live household electrical circuits to make sparks fly just as people were looking over his shoulder to either snoop or make a suggestion to him.  Today, I will tell you about Mr. X and his infamous driving trick.  And, no, this trick did not make him a successful comedian; this one landed him far on the opposite end of the scale.

To perform his driving trick, Mr. X required the following elements: long lines of traffic backed up on each side of a train crossing, a shop truck with the name of our employer in bold graphics on the doors and perfect timing.

Timing often turned out to be the undoing of the driving trick.

As luck might have it, though, Mr. X regularly had a chance to practice his driving trick because the electrical shop that employed us happened to be located very near a railway crossing that often saw trains blocking a busy street.  On many occasions, I was in the passenger seat to experience both the successful execution and the not-so-successful attempts at the driving trick.

This trick required Mr. X to watch the train at the crossing and estimate how long it might take for him to escape from his place in the long line of stopped automobiles, blast down the empty left-hand lane for traffic going the opposite direction (passing all of the other stopped cars ahead of him) and arrive at the rail crossing just as the barrier arms lifted.  If Mr. X arrived at the proper time, he could drift at angle across the railroad tracks (at or slightly above the speed limit) and end up in the proper lane on the far side, sailing by the string of stopped cars waiting for the first car in their line to move.

As I said earlier, timing often proved problematic.  If we ended up with more than a twenty cars ahead of us, our arrival time at the crossing might fall into question.   Often, more than one car in the mix had to give way so Mr. X could maintain forward momentum.  On occasion, we ended up more-or-less parked at the crossing in the wrong lane.  More regularly, a Doppler chorus of automobile horns accompanied our rocketing escape from the traffic stoppage.  All of the attempts were usually followed by incensed phone calls to our shop, the irate drivers having captured the number off the side of the truck as we raced by.

Nice trick, Mr. X.

--Mitchell Hegman