The Daily Peeve / Rant

People who allow their children to scream and fuss in libraries. And librarians who are forced to allow them to get away with it.

People who encourage me to go into debt to support their cause, by pressuring me to agree pay out a certain amount every month.

I am angry at the fellow the other day who, at 4pm in the afternoon, ran his car off the road into a tree.

He had some minor abrasions and bruises.

His 5 year old child was in the back seat, in a booster seat, facing forward, and suffered some painful broken bones and internal injuries. Ever hear a kid screaming in pain as you fasten them to the backboard for helicopter airlift? It's not pretty.

The family dog was dead from the impact, having no seat belt.

I got to cut them all out of the car.

He had *no scent of alcohol* on his breath and body. None. We had a paramedic, a doctor, an EMT, and several firefighters who detected no scent at all, and we were looking for it. He did have impaired mentation, which we thought was perhaps from the trauma. We airlifted him too, because of the possibility of spinal/head injuries. At the hospital, his blood alcohol level was > .25...

And get this - we can't get him on drunk driving, because the blood draw was done in the ER, and not by a law enforcement team, and the hospital is in another county, in another jurisdiction, it would be nearly impossible to convict him. So he's driving around here, today, again....

Luckily(?), child protective services is a bit less fussy about process, and the kid is now elsewhere for a bit.

Of course, the kid is all swaddled up in splints and casts at present. And the nice dog is still dead.

I really really hate drunk drivers.

Well, I was going to complain about my dogs keeping me up all night barking at skunks, but geez...
Driving drunk with a 5 year old? Hope his license is taken away forever.

I spent 4 hours last night in the dark dealing with another drunk-driver vs. tree. This time blocking the main road down to the main resort on the island.

Today's pet peeve though is the angry tourists last night who were upset with me that:

- The road was blocked
- I couldn't tell them how long it was going to be blocked, it was a crime scene and we were still dealing with injured people and finding ejected people
- There was no other road to take
- Really, I wasn't going to let them "just sneak by", the road around the next corner was strewn with car bits, tree bits, people bits, and emergency response folks working.

I returned the favor by noting the plates of the particularly drunken angry tourists, and calling over to the Sheriff on the radio, I think he did quite a bit of business back up at the top of the hill....

I'm now thinking we just need to ban cars here during the summer season.

Drunk drivers are not just a peeve of mine, I really despise them. Last year I had a client who was actually doing some great work and I offered to stay later and let him return after lunch. He did, smelling of beer. When I mentioned it to him, he told me that he likes a few beers with his lunch. When I said that driving with a couple of beers in you might not be such a great idea, he said he was fine.

We got back into working on his resume and it came out that he was job hunting because he had another drunk driving ticket and lost his CDL license and his regular driver's license. When I expressed dismay that not only had he driven at least three times that day, but that one of them was under the influence, he told me that he had to get around somehow.

I am not the morality cops, but my work does have some mandatory reporting aspects. His behavior did not fall within that criteria, but I ended our session, told him not to drive and that we would provide a phone so that he could contact someone, and I then made a report to the department head. Still pisses me off that he was so cavalier about the whole thing and that so many other drunk drivers feel the same.

My peeve today is temperatures flirting with the hundreds, high humidity and it is preventing me from getting some strenuous stuff done. I am a slacker, so it is irritating that I cannot do this after having convinced myself that it needs to be done.

Salespeople
ok I know they are just doing their job, but......

We met my son's solar car team at one of their stops during the mock race they are running this weekend. It was so cool to see it in action after hearing about it for so long. I really really wanted to follow the caravan up the Lake Michigan coast to their stopping point for the night. It would have been a pretty drive in areas. We could have seen how the whole process works. But my DH said he didn't know where they were going or the route they were taking so we came home instead. grr If it was something he wanted to do he would have figured it out.

Today's peeve - the arsonist infesting our island. He burned down the home of a friend of mine a few weeks ago. This week, he set fire to a lovely historic building that was a restaurant and artists' cooperative. The damage puts 8-9 employees out of work, and wipes out 20-25 local artists, including one painter who had a great gallery there with *years* of output.

And while we were fighting that fire, the arsonist set fire to a historic carriage house/barn down the road, right in the middle of a bunch of occupied vacation cottages, perhaps hoping we would be too busy to deal with that. Luckily, logistics is one of our strong points, and while we were fighting Large Fire #1, we split off a force to fight Fire #2.

I have been having some fun on the late-night fire overwatch in the area, lurking in the woods with my camo and my night vision and my coon hound and my radio. I fear if some of the locals catch the fellow first, they'll re-enact The Wicker Man with him at this point. Me, I'm sort of hoping my hound trees him.

Whoa. Hope you catch him.