A creeper followed me home the other day...

@hollboll I think it’s silly that it was pulled because of one customer’s complaint, but then again the mass publicity will only increase sales in other outlets. And honestly, something creepy like that would probably do better at a Spencers Gifts store or some other prank shop.

@ELUNO

sorry for the teeny tiny gif…

@luvche21 It makes it a cuter assassin

@Pavlov Yeah, it’s times like those that I wish I had come up with something super snarky to say back to her. I always get the best comebacks after the fact…

@luvche21

“My horn is set to ‘auto-honk’ when it encounters poor driving,” might have worked well.

@Pavlov “Life must be dull if you have to follow someone for 10 minutes every time you make poor driving decisions.”

@luvche21
This person has mental issues. After it was done and I got over the po’ed part, I might pity her a little. Or not.

Happened once. lady w no brain. Now people don’t follow me home or around w/out me noticing.

@f00l Definitely some kind of mental issues. Or anger issues? Or self-worth issues?

She was seriously wanting to pick a fight to prove to herself that what she did was OK.

@luvche21 Typical (and unfortunately what is now run of the mill / par for the course) suburbia entitlement.

@f00l I try not to piss off mentally ill people.

@sammydog01
You know to be careful around me? Don’t you? Yes?

Let me think. Do you intended to try to beat me against in our last chance league?

Of course, Brady will he suited up for me soon. Not stuck at home with Giselle, poor thing.

But what if he has a bad day? Are you feeling cautious? Or ready to live dangerously?

@Pavlov And then they would have called the police on YOU. Good game.

@givemeyoursoul He mentioned the 1/4 mile private driveway… for the most part, if your noise isn’t pissing off neighbors, you can honk your horn on your own property all you want.

@sammydog01 yeah, if only I had known before I I honked at her…

@Thumperchick Thats true. If someone followed me up a 1/4 mile driveway, anyone I didn’t recognize, I would call the police immediately, honestly. People be crazy. Last thing I need is to get gunned down in front of my house by some nut that thinks I cut them off.

@givemeyoursoul @Thumperchick we did have the police called on us a month or so ago… but that’s another story for another time involving another crazy - and I promise we didn’t do ANYTHING to deserve it (not even honking horns at anyone…), just another crazy!

@luvche21 I meant your response was just fine- she probably felt better and forgot about it. Some snappy comeback would have been a mistake.

@sammydog01 Oh, I understood what you meant - but if only she had a crazy sticker on her minivan saying not to honk or she’d follow me home or something

@cranky1950
Remedy or no remedy?

Harder choice than I would have expected.

@cranky1950 that was… disturbing.

@luvche21 It would be to someone who didn’t live through the Anacin commercials of the 60s and 70s. and babyjane

@cranky1950
Does Anacin help if you’re cranky?

@cranky1950 Love that movie. Except for the canary.

@f00l Supposedly, but hey I’m against using drugs as a crutch y’nowotImeanUnowotI’mmasayin.

@cranky1950
Cranky!

@medz creeper.

@medz myeaahhhh… you’re never in the right when you do that. /preachy

@medz You are endangering yourself. Someone will shoot you. They will be wrong and go to jail. You will be dead. If you did this to me, I would call the police and drive around until they pulled you over.

@givemeyoursoul yeah, but you’ll think twice about thowing litter out you car next time

@medz
Follow them home, no way. The ought to call the cops on me if I do that. Or I should call on them.

But I have done this thing I call “long distance tailgating” to just a few. Far less than 1 driver a year. To someone who is an incredible dickhead driver. Not a litterer - someone who is behaving horribly.

And not to a racer or an impaired. There’s just no way to pull it off without being the same level of insane jerk they are being if they’re racing. Impaired drivers, I call 911. Racers, I just hope they don’t hurt anyone. By the time I could call and the cops respond they’d be 10 miles gone.

I mean road bullies. People who could go around, when lots of room, and don’t, instead they tailgate way close and pop their brights and honk. (Yeah I know laws about lanes). Or people who tailgate and honk like they’re the police on a chase, when the roads are clogged, and they do this to one car after another, nowhere to go anyway. I’ll get behind them and match their speed exactly. From a good distance back.

They totally get creeped out and notice. They change lanes. I change lanes with them. And repeat.

Not for long. A few miles max. Then I back off.

For some reason they often stop driving like dicks for a while. It must be the creep aspect.

So far nobody’s shot at me or retaliated in another way. I do stay way way back. I don’t do this often.

Assholes sometimes carry, so my doing this is likely stupid.

@f00l you get it

@givemeyoursoul And in FL the stand your ground law would mean likely they’d get away with shooting you. As someone else said, provoking road rage is never a good idea regardless of who is in the right.

@medz stalking someone seems more of a crime than throwing litter on the road.

@medz I get it, too. It’s not illegal to take the same route as someone else and I assume you’re not taking it as far as the lady in the OP’s story. It’s just a way of making them think you live in the same neighborhood as them and that now one of their neighbors knows they’re a douche in hopes of changing their future behavior. I’m also assuming that you don’t continue to do regular drive-bys or anything like that, so while it’s not something I would do personally, I don’t see it as being a creeper or stalkerish.

@PurplePawprints you got it

@PocketBrain I like how you tied two forum threads together. Nicely done!

@Thumperchick and why do all the good ones come to mind well after the fact?

@luvche21 the same reason you have all your best arguments alone in the shower.

@AROAH I didn’t have reason to even think someone was following me, which is also creepy.

@luvche21
Light paranioa and a bit of tensioned local awareness has its place.

@SSteve My sentiments exactly. I live in Florida, and it’s very likely to be true. Road rage incidents here don’t even make the front page any more.

@cengland0 This is me, too.

@cengland0 I’m going to put my meh sticker in my window. That ought to be safe.

@cengland0
Yeah I’m big on auto anonymity. Why make oneself memorable leable?

@OldCatLady

@f00l Yea. Honking is srs business.
Learned this in Abq one day while living in the warzone.

Banana yellow lowrider was blocking the first of 2 entrances to my apartment parking lot. Honked (short, polite honk) to sort of let the owner know they could pull out onto the road, while I’d be waiting patiently to pull in.

Guy did Not move, just stared me down.
I decided the best course of action would be to drive the half block into the other entrance to the lot. Noticed the guy pulled out (scraping ofc), followed me into the second entrance.

Being non confrontational on this particular day (and no gun), I spent the better part of an hour being chased by this guy before making it to the west side where he gave in, driving back to where he was headed I assume.

Now I have to live in the same complex with this guy for the next year until I had the money to move. EVERY single day I got up and went to work FOR A WHOLE YEAR I just assumed the guy would be out waiting for me. Apparently I wasn’t worth it.

So my lesson learned that day was not to honk, at ANYTHING. Just not worth it… I’ve even let an old obese woman in a light blue minivan back out into my car in a Bestbuy parking lot, knocking the car onto its side. I figured she did me a favor though, it was a Saturn and I wasn’t hurt.

Be kind to your fellow drivers, you never know who’s behind that wheel.

@cengland0 this is dumb

@StrangerDanger I’ve always wondered if there is legal recourse in situations like that - say your wife cut her head and had to go to the hospital… could the other party be held responsible even though there wasn’t an actual accident?

@luvche21
Lawyers can fuck with anything. Yes. But serious PITA if you’re not in the profession and don’t have an obvious case

If medical bills occured, some lawyer would prob look at this.

@cengland0 I do that sometimes too. You’re not alone. Even though it’s silly, you never know. Maybe my driving inadvertently pissed some psychopath off enough that they wanted to mark my house to do something later. All I have to lose is a scenic route around my neighborhood and to see which house the car goes to.

@cengland0 I’ve done this before. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut feelings.

@cengland0 I did have someone follow me home, once. I passed my place and looped back to a well lit and very public space - they finally backed off. Still not sure why, but I’m glad I noticed them making the same unlikely series of turns through the residential area.

@cengland0 I do this on occasion. I don’t think its paranoid. It is a pretty easy measure to take (it might only take an additional 30 seconds or so to get home) to be safer.

@cengland0 I have done this a dozen times. I became aware of this when once a car did follow me home at night. They parked blocking my driveway and as I got out two guys got out. Just as my brain clicked on “Alarm! Alarm!” my 150lb Great Dane popped out of the car and started barking aggressively at them. As a puppy she’d actually practiced deep, scary barks, and as a grown up she was quite impressive. They leaped back in their car and took off. Since then I have been alert. If I feel like a car is possibly following me I make sure to turn down streets that are not my own. Once a car had followed me from the supermarket. It followed me through a series of turns and did not break off till I led them to the main cop shop a couple of miles from my house and pulled into their very well lit parking lot. I waited till I could no longer see their taillights, gave it a few more minutes, then left by a different exit onto a one-way street and looped around a bit to make sure I had no tail before going home.

@RiotDemon your “gut feeling” is your “second brain” located in the gut’s neural network. If you don’t know about the subject, look into it, fascinating stuff.

@ongware I don’t like forced merges either.

There’s a huge difference between drivers in Japan and in the States. Forced merging happens ALL THE TIME in Japan, and it’s just a part of getting around. It was incredibly scary at first (even though I was never the driver), but I noticed that drivers NEVER got mad about it, and never even honked at other drivers. The main reason is because if the other driver didn’t take that chance to get on the road then, he wouldn’t have another chance for quite a while. Crazy traffic over there.

@ongware Creepy. I have found that when I drive my husband’s extended cab pick-up truck everyone stays out of my way. Maybe change your ride?

@luvche21 It’s like that in Cambodia too only traffic usually isn’t going all that fast. I joked it was chaos in slow motion.

@ongware A forced merge is one thing if there is an issue like a recently stalled car in their lane, but I can’t stand when the person knows they have had to merge for 2 miles, but are just trying to avoid waiting like the other 500 cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

@katylava sometimes I wonder how most of us survived to adulthood…

@daveinwarsh Darn- I wanted to see what happened when the police showed up.

@sammydog01 Me too, that was kind of anti-climatic.

@sammydog01 I guess we should just be glad Dave got home safely, police or no police.

@daveinwarsh I’ll never understand people like this. So, he called you a name… Yell back if you want and then get the fuck on with your life. Instead now you’re missing your appointment and you’ll tell everyone that the guy who called you a name is to blame… Blah blah.

@sammydog01 @therealjrn One of the annotations at the end says the police never came, and she eventually drove away.

@dashcloud Never there when you need them huh!

@daveinwarsh
Imagine having that person in your family.

A completely irrational set of:
“It’s your fault this!”
"It’s your fault that!"
Yell yell yell.
Accuse accuse accuse.
Lecture lecture lecture.

Whoa.

@dashcloud I’m surprised they didn’t come over and arrest her for abusing the 911 system.

@sammydog01 wonder how long she waited until she drove off.

@daveinwarsh Disabled my ass! Maybe mentally, but not physically. She has a disabled parking placard hanging from her rear view mirror. Fraud! I AM physically disabled, assholes like her, and there are MANY of them, make it exceedingly difficult to find disabled parking for me. I am thankful that I can walk, albeit with a cane, and am headed towards a wheelchair. Having to walk the length of a parking lot, then go shopping, causes an increase in what is already difficult to manage pain, then exhaustion from dealing with the pain. I REFUSE to use the electric carts just because of the 500-600lb Tessies/Toms that use them. A machine squealing in pain is just too much to bear hearing. I’m 6’4" and 250lbs, so would be a light load, but just can’t do it.
I just wish there was a way to stop this fraudulent use of disabled parking placards/tags. I mean perfectly ambulatory people, new moms with their baby, mom/dad/3 kids all healthy, work trucks, tow trucks, 3.5 ton farm trucks w/ 8 healthy family members, medical/pharmaceutical sales reps, etc all sporting disabled parking placards and/or tags, and parked in disabled parking spaces. All documented. Here, literally every other car has one. Grrrrr!

@Lurker Next you’re going to say my Service Armadillo can’t come on the plane with me!

@daveinwarsh I like the chicken dance.

@daveinwarsh You should of picked up her trash Dave.

@therealjrn
"I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,"

@sammydog01 I also thought the chicken dance was a nice touch to help make her point.

@therealjrn I couldn’t. There was a 3-bag limit. She exceeded that limit by 1.

@daveinwarsh Well, rules are rules.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@daveinwarsh come’on…this was really an anti-drugs commercial, right? Or a commercial for valium…

@daveinwarsh Damnit. Why is there nothing saying what happened next? I want some closure.

@daveinwarsh
I am so glad this one got filmed.

Makes me feel all sane.

@daveinwarsh I tried this down at COX today. They still didn’t lift my bandwidth caps.

@therealjrn
Those people at Cox just can’t appreciate good performance art.

Clearly a buncha Philistines.

@f00l I gotta say, I liked the young dude spontaneously “helping” the plaintiff. lol And folks say young people don’t get it!

@phatmass
How would a driver in a vehicle behind the stopped vehicle know what was going on, without any visual information?

I would have tapped the horn if someone had stopped for no apparent reason, and then stayed stopped, without making an effort to pull over to the side the road or get out of the way, and not putting on blinkers.

Further I seriously doubt the explanation being anywhere near true. People who “stop to help someone” don’t usually follow that up by stalking someone else to their destination in order to argue about it.

Also, sane and emotionally stable people who “stop to help” and get honked at already know why other drivers are honking. They don’t have to stalk some other driver in order to clear up the mystery of the honking.

@f00l a person who says “to the extremely overweight lady” and has already admitted to being liberal with the horn, an outsider could reasonably conclude that she may not have been the “sane or emotionally stable” one. I’m just saying it helps to look in the mirror every once in awhile.

@phatmass
I don’t know whether the “degree of horn honking” was justified. Since the OP mentioned possible overhonking, it seems that person already has the capacity to look in the mirror, and uses it to some degree.

However, some driver following some other driver around to complain about honking is just emotionally weird, plain creepy, and possibly dangerous.

@f00l sure, but from the account that was described, the lady seemed to be polite about it. Maybe passive aggressive, but at least not like some drivers who would drive dangerously and attempt to cause an accident out of anger or retaliation.

@phatmass
Stalking is creepy. Being a “nice stalker” doesn’t cut it as an exculpation.

There are reasons to try to follow someone that most sane people would admit are valid. Hit and run, you want the plate. Tire nearly flat or at their mechanical prob the driver might not know about yet. Something fell out of the vehicle and the driver didn’t notice. Sure. That doesn’t exhaust the list.

But for hit and run - or theft - or other confrontational stuff where something actually needed to be resolved, and walking away is plain irrational - just get close enough to photo the license plate and then split. For other confrontational stuff, proceed with extreme caution and ask self repeatedly if you really really need to do this. Consider whether to have another person, or a police person, present during the conversation. In fact, have another person present if it isn’t worth calling someone else to be there, it prob isn’t worth the confrontation.

For stuff where you could walk away, no harm no foul, except irritation or frustration or anger - you just walk away.

For someone to stop in the middle of the street - no reason another driver could see - not put blinkers on - just stop - stay stopped - get honked at - not be able to figure out why you were getting honked at (how is that possible?) - follow someone around in your car in order to confront them, even if “nicely” - is creepy, and is indication of notable emotional or cognitive disturbance, or plain bad judgement. Or possibly worse. The person followed get to have a bad experience thru no fault of their own, having behaved reasonably - then gets followed home as punishment?

no matter how “nice” the stalker behaves, the stalkee has to worry. You can’t always tell by looks. What if you’ve just encountered someone who “nicely” causes problems in other people’s lives, habitually? What if someone else in the stalker’s family is not so nice? What if it’s a setup for something else? Theft, harassment, bogus claims, endless complaints?

I do feel some compassion for the stalker in this case - the person may be losing the ability to function well. But that doesn’t make stalking, even “nice” stalking, acceptable.

@f00l tl;dr

@phatmass If I may summarize for @f00l, following someone to their house is creepy and unacceptable no matter how polite you are.

@sammydog01 agreed. But is it worse than road rage? I think that’s where I was taking the philosophical argument.

@phatmass I would take road rage over having a crazy person know where I live.

@phatmass By the way, this is me. Just ask my kids.

@phatmass
I detected possible reasonably behavior, or possible road irritation in the OP. I detected zero road rage, although the stalker/follower may have been carrying some, toned down.

Road rage and stalking are both bad.

Around here, road rage involves weapons, or aggressive tailgating, or lane nudging, or hitting the horn to the point of harassment or to the point of annoying other drivers, or screaming from the car window, or driving alongside gesturing at length, or following someone in an aggressive and threatening way, or similar.

I.E. way more than a few honks, which may be perfectly legit and polite. And road rage involves way more than a middle finger which is certainly not polite.

Around here being involved in road rage, or in stalking by car, has a notable likelihood of being unsafe for either or both parties.

@daveinwarsh Oh shit. I had somebody stop dead in front of me this morning trying to merge with the access road traffic for the expressway. We had our own lane but the person wanted to swing over three lanes to get to a side road 1/2 mile away. :le_sigh:

I’m going to go ahead and posit that some people do not belong on or near expressways.

@daveinwarsh yes, car horns are there for a reason. To warn. Using a car horn to vent frustration or send a message is actually illegal.

@daveinwarsh Having lived and traveled in many parts of the country, I can attest to the fact that horn usage/acceptance varies by locale. Some places the horn is applied as liberally as @carl669 uses “fuck” in his comments. Other places it is used more as a short “heads up” comment. Where I live now, horns and turn signals are rarely used, and red lights are mere suggestions to stop, so newcomers quickly learn defensive driving. That includes being very wary of pissing off a driver who might follow you for a chance to aggressively continue the “conversation,” or, too often, pull a gun to make a point of their annoyance with your perceived driving criticism. After 30 years here, I sometimes have to remind myself that vehicles have horns, and try to find where it is located on my current drive in the off chance I might think of a reason to use it.