This is one of those rants that has a lot of moving parts that have to all be put together before it will make sense...
First off, there was this episode of Star Trek: Voyager where The Doctor took it into his holographic head to program himself a holographic family. Of course, they were like the Cleavers from Leave It To Beaver so Torres reprogrammed some reality into them. Part of that realism involved the son as typical angsty teenager starts hanging out with a bunch of Klingon kids, and in his wannabe state starts listening to this horrific Klingon angst rock, at maximum volume. It's awful, and I even felt a little sympathy for The Doctor, which was unusual, simce I mostly think he's a prick and deserves anything bad that might happen to him.
Anyway, odd thing to know, in Southern California it is fairly routine to crest over a small rise while driving and have the car radio spontaneously shift from the station you were listening to to another station broadcasting from somewhere ahead of you on the same frequency. This is related to the directional characteristics of car radio antennas, which increase their range in whatever direction they are tilted.
Another thing about Southern California currently is that one of our main freeways has been undergoing refurbishing approximately forever. The project reached the stage where the repaving was completed and they put in a minimal amount of the little reflectors, but apparently before they got around to painting the lines they decided that the pavement was already going to crap and they might as well wait until after the next repaving before they bothered.
My boss/business partner/coworker...depends on the day...has this truck. We call it "Big Steady" since the day we blew a tire under load on a two lane highway and managed to get pulled over and stopped without dying and I decided I needed to be more respectful. Before that I called it "the land barge." It's a crew cab diesel with a long bed, which is very unusual. Normally, crew cabs come with the short bed option, or at most the standard bed. No disrespect to Big Steady, but driving it is like navigating an oil tanker.
So, we get to this job site...painting job...and we aren't even really started when the mechanic that is rebuilding the motor in our dump truck calls. He's just noticed that one of the injector retainers is cracked and this has put the brakes on the reassembling of the motor. Nowhere he knows of has the part in stock; he's called and checked. We call my friend and he knows a place that almost always has even the most obscure parts, but of course he doesn't know the name of the place, or even the street it is on, but he can give us landmark directions of the "turn left at the Church's Chicken" sort. We can't call to see if they have the part. Since my boss is the better painter we make the command decision and I'm off to get the part...hopefully. Too far the wrong way to go home and get my truck though, so I'm driving Big Steady. The shop is in the southern edge districts of the city of LA, we're in the northern part of the county in the very fringe of the suburbs.
I reach the bad part of interstate five, and I'm already hating this project. The diesel has plenty of power, but it lacks the pop that my truck has so every lane change is a project, as if finding a space big enough wasn't a complex problem to begin with. I'm stressed, plus I've temporarily switched the radio to a news station that does traffic reports every ten minutes and been stuck listening to Dingbat Don for some stretch before I gave up and switched back to an FM rock station so I'm also irritated about the state of the world. Now I'm on this fifty foot wide strip of mostly unmarked blacktop with a swarm of daft drivers at least theoretically trying to form four lines of fast moving metal objects. It's chaos.
I sort of line up behind this car, figuring that if I'm not really in a lane at least I won't be alone. That isn't necessarily true since the truck probably sticks out a full foot on either side of their car, but it's about the best I can do. At irregular intervals I'm seeing a flash of reflectors appear briefly between the cars and I try to hit between them, sort of like an out of control downhill ski racer suddenly seeing a gate on the course and slipping through. This is full attention required driving of the absolute sort.
And there's an almost imperceptible crest in the road and my radio switches from the rock station to...what? The lyrics aren't English, which isn't unusual, but they aren't Spanish, which I would recognize, either. German? Dutch? Some sort of throat torturing language filled with grating phlegm filled coughs and barks. And the 'music,' mass torture of cats, with brass and a full percussion section competing in volume without discernible pattern. And I really can't lose focus to change the station without serious risk. There was wind noise in it. Loud wind noise. Then it hits me...is that the effing Klingon music from Star Trek? I'm actually not sure that it wasn't.
It was only a couple minutes before we returned to lane lines and I could change the station, but they may have been the longest three minutes I've ever had to endure.
