Driving & Scraping

I was driving in heavy traffic, trying to merge onto a very busy urban multi-lane freeway.  There were several cars on the on-ramp in front of me all being held up by a badly underpowered semi.  The semi was near the end of the ramp and hadn’t gotten to more than 25 or 30 mph.  There were limited gaps and not enough shoulder to just continue accelerating in it looking for a gap.  It was beginning to look like everyone was going to have come to a stop, but someone switched left out of the adjacent lane and suddenly there was a small gap, so I swerved over and stomped the gas to the floor and jumped out into traffic.

I maneuvered around for a while and it began to snow.  Soon it was snowing heavily and there began to be wheel tracks on the pavement with piles of snow in between.  Eventually the traffic thinned, maybe because the snow was getting bad.  Snow was now a foot to 18” deep between the wheel paths and I was surprised how well the vehicle I was driving (don't know what it was) was doing about not slowing down or hanging up in the snow. 

It was starting to feel like I’d been driving a long time.  I think I was circling Indianapolis, but am not sure.  I was finishing a triangular trip that involved Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa.  I stopped and went into a convention center type building.  The conference room I was in seated about 1000 people.  It had glass walls all the way up to a ceiling about 50 feet high.  The glass was apparently not well insulated because it was glazed with ice, being cold outside and having the condensate from all those people in it.  The speaker was lamenting that we couldn’t see out the glass because of the frost on it, saying we needed to install fans or make some of the people leave.  I noticed there were scrapers on each table so I stood up and made a speech.

I said that the speaker had given a response typical for our society:  People are the problem, not the solution.  Technology is the solution.  I said that it seemed likely to me that the ice scrapers on the tables were put there to enable us all to scrape the windows so we could see.  Several people looked at me like I was crazy, but others got up, grabbed their scrapers and started clearing the glass.