What is it with women letting their dress or skirt hang out the car door?

I don't get it. If I was sitting in a car seat or driver's seat and a third of my skirt was hanging out the car door, that means I'm mighty uncomfortable, with my skirt all swished to one side and bundled up or squished up a tad under half of me. Way too uncomfortable.

When I get in the car, and I do happen to be wearing a skirt and dress - which is not that often actually as I'm a jeans and tshirt kinda girl - I make sure that I'm comfortable. I don't want to catch somebody giving me funny glances at red traffic lights later when I'm fiddling beneath me trying to yank my skirt right.

I think the only time I might not care how uncomfortable I was, sitting on a squished up skirt with some of it hanging our the car door, might be if I'm flying to hospital, through red robots, with my lights flashing, or something, with an injured or very ill kid in the car.

Now, most times I notice other women's skirts hanging out the car door is when we're all parked at traffic lights - and they're not dashing anywhere - they're just sitting uncomfortably on part of their skirt - or, maybe not too uncomfortably if the skirt or skirt of a dress is all pulled off nicely to the side underneath (and out the door) (but, surely, then, it feels tight and uncomfortable up against the leg that's toward the inside of the car?) with the rest dragging on the road. I don't get it.

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2010

Why drive with car lights on during the day?

Well, I think that here in South Africa, anyway, it is illegal for motorcyclists to ride their motocyles without their lights (light?) on. This makes sense - they're much smaller on the roads than cars, and being more visible on motorbikes is safer for both motorcylists and drivers of cars.

Drivers of cars, on the other hand, don't have to drive with their lights on, unless they really need to because they simply can't see well enough due to it being dark (because it's night or there's heavy rainfall) or due to there being a lot of fog or mist, or dust flying about on a dry dirt road.

Many cars do have their lights on, though, even on sunny days. This makes them more visible to other motorists, and what with the rate of car accidents in South Africa obviously needing to be reduced, why not? When you're in a crazy rush, but still trying to drive carefully, you may still be stressed enough not to notice that car speeding up because it's a similar colour to the road, or the sun might be in your eyes.

The above was pretty much explained by me to my 12 year old son the other morning in the car (I was driving) on the way to school. Along the highway, he asked: "Mom, it's sunny so why do just about all those cars have their lights on?" (the cars that were approaching us, travelling in the opposite direction, on the other side of the highway.)

I answered, while squinting against the very bright sunlight in my face, "Well, the sun is in my eyes right now, and it's bugging me, so I'm trying to concentrate on only the road directly in front of me. Now should one of those other cars on the other side of the highway have some kind of an accident and come careening towards us, there's a chance I might not notice, against this glare, and we'll have a bad accident. However, if their lights are on, even though the sun is also shining in my eyes, I am more likely to notice this sudden approach of lights coming at us from the other side of the road, and possibly have time to react."

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2010