Those don't need batteries. .... Except for the tactical picatinny flashlights.

Our Maglites take D cells.

Ouch!

Are you trying to attract Leslie's attention?

He doesn't have to try.

Pet peeve: tables that rock (in a restaurant / cafe), it's not that hard to fix

Bloody school buses. Well American ones anyway, they're so ****ing obnoxious, stopping every six feet and putting on their stupid nanny state red lights and stop signs. Made even worse by the fact that a major commuter railway line into Chicago starts in our town and crosses several roads on my way into work, and of course the irritating shits stop by those for seventeen years because one bus got hit by a train in the 1860s

When we got the bus into school, we rode normal buses and the entire road didn't have to stop when we got on and off because surprise surprise our parents taught us that it's stupid to run out into the road when traffic is present. Both my schools were on busy stretches of one of the busiest roads in the area as well. The only time someone got hit was at the pelican crossing, once, never from a bus.

Of course, this morning it wasn't bad enough that a couple of parents parked their **** ugly SUVs right in the middle of the road at the stop sign, but did the bus pull over a bit so I could nip out turning away from him onto the main road? Did he bollocks. ****ing twat. I hope he gets a mind bogglingly itchy arse and isn't able to scratch it.

Not a good start to the day then?

I'm OK now, but I really do hate those annoying yellow bastards. Presumably America, the land of the free, is the only country in the world who gets a hard on for such blatant authoritarianism.

Now you're sounding like Hungry Horace!

Like a stopped clock, occasionally he is right about some things.

I've never run over a child once in 15 years of driving, I don't think allowing me to pass a school bus in the morning is going to result in GTA in real life. I do have working eyes and a working brain, after all.

Plus, kids aren't stupid even if their parents are. They know cars hurt when they run into you

I think there's some legitimacy to the school bus rant. There is a school bus stop close to my workplace. There are always about six cars/SUVs clustered around it. The kids don't even get out of these cars until the bus arrives and pops out the stop sign.

So you have to wait for the kids to cross the road and kiss the parent good bye. Then, this popped out stop sign doesn't apparently apply to the people dropping off their kids. I'm sure these people can't live more than five minutes walk away

I am not sure how long they are told to stop at the railroad crossing but I think they may be told to recite the alphabet backwards twice in their heads.

School is about learning. The school bus experience is merely preparing them for life in the real world. Otherwise how on earth are they expected to grow up into ignorant selfish twunts who step out in front of moving cars without looking, then shamble across at dead slow/stop without even acknowledging the drivers existence, or hold up all the traffic by pushing their shopping carts down the middle of the road outside the grocery store, or cause chaos behind them by coming to an emergency stop in the middle of a two lane road for a kid who is still 10 yards from the curb and not even looking like wanting to cross....?

Maybe a youth in Ferguson MO might be alive today if he had learned that walking down the middle of the road with no regard for traffic just isn't cool.

Of course, how could I have missed the obvious

They mustn't know their alphabet very well because I swear I felt my hair grow yesterday morning when I was stuck behind one at the crossing ...

Must admit, it's never been so bad that I wanted to shoot any of them, although I have occasionally wondered whether I could use my truck as a cue ball to split off the pedestrian from their shopping cart, pocketing the latter in the cart rack while using enough backspin to get the truck in position for a second shot on the pedestrian...probably watched too much Pot Black in my youth....