Chamblee, GA

I only have a few minutes to type this while they're unloading my truck, but I did have two people that nearly caused accidents just within the first six miles out of the Charlotte operating center. The first incident happened while I was just pulling out of the gate; there's a fairly steep hill on the way out of there and, with a 44,000 pound load, I couldn't get above 10 mph on it. It's a two lane road, marked with double yellow lines, but some idiot in a van decided to pass me... and very nearly crashed head on into a vehicle that was just cresting the hill. They missed one another by inches; they're both lucky that there was a wide shoulder on that side of the road. I couldn't have done anything about it, either, since it was happening too quickly to react and if I stopped I don't think I could have gotten the truck rolling again. Even dumber, though, is that the van was for some professional services company; if he had stopped at the red light at the end of the road, I would have taken down his unit number and called it in, but he wasn't even phased by that.

The second incident was on the Interstate, about three miles down the highway. There was just one vehicle trying to merge onto the highway, which has a speed limit of 60 going through Charlotte. I was in the right lane and signaled left to try and give him room to get onto the road, but a vehicle in the next lane over wasn't about to yield or shift lanes, even though he had plenty of room to do so. As for the merging vehicle, rather than accelerating to get ahead of me or waiting and getting on the road behind me, he decided to move left and get in front of me while he was still doing about 35. I couldn't have stopped in time; while I had plenty of distance to the next vehicle in front of me, I couldn't have stopped for the moron that had merged onto the road while doing barely half the posted speed limit. So, I did the only thing I could do; hit the brakes so hard that I spilled my drink and tugged on the horn. He took the hint and accelerated just enough to avoid the collision, which left me doing 45 and losing speed while going up hill.

Seriously, is anyone else seeing problems with people being stupid on the road lately or is that just a phenomenon in Charlotte?