Etiquette Excellence: Driving

This article was written for mass publication and was crafted in such a way that any newspaper can run the guide before any major holiday to remind the readership about safety.

With the upcoming holiday weekend, there will no doubt be thousands of motorists flooding our streets and highways in order to be home for such a joyous occasion. In fact, it's hard to talk about this particular without remembering this day and all of the celebrations it brings to us. The streets aglow with fireworks, kids running with valentines, and inside houses across the country, families share a turkey dinner while passing out fake dog doo. But before you honor our fallen soldier by dressing up as a whore-nurse, please keep the roads safe with some basic driving tips.

Traffic lights
The meaning of traffic lights have been embedded in our culture. From an early age, it is known that red means passion and aggressiveness and green means success and money. However, some states have adopted traffic lights with up to 17 different light colors in order to better help traffic flow. Blue means calmness and devotion, orange means vitality and alertness, and brown means the right turn lane is closed.

Lane merging
Whether on an expressway or sidestreet, lane merging always proves to be a balls-to-the-wall experience. In order to get into the correct lane, it is expected of you to turn on your turn signal and negotiate speed with the people in the desired lane. As someone in the desired lane, your job is to keep at perfect pace with the car in the lane over, even in the event of a full stop. While this might be a double-standard of understanding and assholery, you are really overlooking the worn down emotional state people drive with during this holiday weekend. They could be the nicest people ever off of the road, but you do not want to get between them and a night of BBQs and haunted houses.

Flashing your brights
Brights should only be flashed when you want to blind all traffic in front of you in a hope that they all fly off the road and burst into flames. If you think you are helping them with a small warning that their tail light is out, or that they forgot to turn their headlights on, or that there is a killer in the back seat, you are wrong.

4 way stops
Chances are if you just drive through them really fast, no one will hit you. I mean, they are going slow from all that stopping they had to do, and if they cannot react to you barreling down the road, then I guess they shouldn't be driving. Besides, for this holiday weekend, we all know that witnessing a man blow a 4-way stop means good luck, and that is the way its always been since the Dutch brought the day over to honor the Druid new year.

And as always, watch out for Trick and Treaters.