How is This Helping?

On my way back from Irwin yesterday, I had one of those experiences that really makes you wonder what some people think is going on.

I was going across the bridge at the bottom of Jacktown Hill when I noticed someone was tailgating me.  So, as is my custom in such cases, I slowed to match the speed of the car in the right lane.  This caused my follower to have to slow down as well, whereupon he hit his horn.  And held it, for a good fifteen seconds.

Around this was when I realized I had a real piece of work on my hands.

After a few seconds, when he realized I wasn't speeding up, he started beeping again--apparently with the aim of getting me to look in the rearview mirror so I could see he was flipping me off.  This continued all the way up the hill to the stoplight, where we had to wait (and he kept beeping, even as we were sitting waiting for the light to change).  Fortunately he turned at the shopping center, which is only a few hundred yards down; I was beginning to worry for his blood pressure.

What perplexes me about the whole affair is what the heck good he thought it was going to do to keep expressing his ire.  If he'd been tailgating accidentally, which does happen on occasion, and had backed off when my slowing down made him realize what he'd done, I'd've been happy to get out of his way.  As it was, though, I should think it was clear that I didn't care for his behavior; no one accidentally paces the slow lane for a mile and a half in the face of honking horns and flashing lights.  It takes no great insight into human behavior, nor ability to read my mind, to figure out that all that the beeping and flashing was going to accomplish was making me more likely to continue pissing him off.  Where's the good of that?  Was he trying to intimidate me?  When it's obvious someone's mad at you and that this is making them do something you don't like, why go out of your way to try to make them madder?

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