Strange Happenings (and Happy ICLW!)

First I want to say Happy ICLW! :) If this is your first time at my blog, you can learn more about me from reading my timeline (in the side bar) and reading this post that I wrote last month for ICLW.

Now on to the weirdness…

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On Friday morning R and I were on our way to work, about to turn left onto a small side street that has access to our parking garage, when an incident occurred. DT Al.bany is a busy place in the mornings – there are a lot of people on the sidewalks and cars all over the place.

There was a truck turning left, from this small side street, on to our street, so R waited for it to turn in front of us before turning (this was not technically the right of way rule but R was being nice and trying to get the truck out of his way).

At the same time, there was a woman with a seeing-eye dog on the sidewalk approaching the crosswalk across this side street. (No walk lights or traffic lights here – the intersection is very small.) I happened to be watching her because I love dogs and dogs being trained for service interest me. I couldn’t tell if she was blind but she probably was - she also seemed to be training the dog (telling it when to stop and when to go).

She got to the crosswalk around the same time as the truck was turning out in front of us. She stopped at the street because if she didn’t, she would have walked right into the truck.

After the truck turned, the road was clear and she could have crossed. By that time we had been waiting to turn for a while and people were backing up behind us. We, of course, waited for her to cross for a while, but she never did. We were blocking traffic and R made the decision to turn, since the woman and her dog were still very much on the sidewalk. My thought at this time was that she was wanting to wait until most of the traffic dissipated (including us).

Unfortunately, as soon as R committed to the turn, and was at the crosswalk, the woman and the dog decided to start crossing.

Bad situation all around. Looking back, for maximum safety, maybe R should have waited in the road until whenever she decided to cross since she was most likely blind and wasn’t able to tell we were there.

But, R made the decision he thought was correct at the time, a decision I probably would have made as well with the available information.

This sounds ominous but nothing bad happened. We went through the crosswalk ahead of her at the same time she and her dog were also in the crosswalk – probably about 10 feet away from us. If we had stopped when we saw her start walking, we would have been right in her way, in the middle of the crosswalk.

That brings us to the “strange” part of the story.

We parked and as we were getting our stuff from the back seat, a car pulled up behind us. He wasn’t parking, just pulled up and stopped in the middle of the driving area of the parking garage.

He had his window rolled down and began yelling at us that we almost hit a blind lady – didn’t we see her?! we created a very dangerous situation!! what kind of terrible people were we?? and on and on… It completely surprised us and we are both not ones to roll over and show our bellies to people being assholes for no reason. We yelled right back that he had no reason to be confronting us. Finally, I told him to move along since he was holding up traffic behind him by then. He rolled his eyes at us, but he moved along.

We thought that was the end of it. But, as we were crossing the street outside the parking garage to our building the same guy runs (literally) up behind us, confronts R and calls him a “fat f*ck”.

We start yelling at him again to leave us alone and mind his own business. I asked him why he thought he needed to confront strangers because he thought they made a mistake – “You’ve never made any mistakes??” He said “DID I SAY THAT!?” I yelled that he was a self righteous asshole.

He was very physical, and while he never touched either of us, we could both tell he wanted to. He was right in R’s face, as close as possible without touching, and he kept shoving his finger at me like he wanted to push me. It was all bizarre. I am NOT afraid of people like this and I yell right back. Maybe not so great to do, especially if he was violent but that’s just how I am.

The guy followed us into our building (we think he might work here too) and kept arguing with us until we got in the elevator. Most of what was said is all a blur of adrenaline now. As we got in the elevator, the arguing was dying down (it was mostly just between him and me at that point) and I told him that I hoped he wasn’t going to be an asshole for the rest of his life. And as the elevator doors were closing, I told him, in a calm voice, that we really felt sorry for him. I wanted this guy to feel bad that he caused conflict about something that was in no way his business. And I do feel sorry for him on some level – he must be a very sad/angry person to want to start shit with total strangers over something that had nothing to do with him.

Seriously? What did he expect to accomplish by yelling at people who were involved in an unfortunate situation? R is a very good driver and would never have done anything to put this woman in danger. Sometimes close calls just happen. I’m obviously still angry at this guy because writing this out made me want to yell at him some more. I can’t help thinking about what this guy wanted us to do? Say we were sorry… to him?? I just don’t know.

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There is going to be some disruption here in DT Alb.any starting this week.

C.olumbia Pic.tures is apparently shooting some of a movie here and will be closing various streets all around our building from 7am – 7pm off and on for the next couple weeks. If you are interested in this type of thing you can read the little blurb they sent to us here.

While this has the potential to be very annoying, it also has the potential to be very exciting/interesting. One street that will be closed off is the main street right outside my office window. I’m hoping I get some good views :)

I’m going to start bringing my camera to work just in case.

(and hey, maybe jerkface will confront us again and I can snap his pic and post it all over the internet! hah)