Among other things, Indiana is an agricultural state. While it may not be that obvious in some places, it is very obvious on the county roads. In the spring and fall, planting and harvest seasons, it is likely that you will meet or get behind a piece of farm machinery that is going as fast it can but still way under the speed limit. And if the reason you chose the county road was to avoid all the slow-moving traffic on the highway, you are more likely to get behind that piece of machinery and for a longer stretch of miles. You can honk and the farmer will wave but won’t be able to get out of your way. You can lay on the horn and the machine may slow down a bit, just to boil your blood a little faster. You could try running into the machine to push it off the road, but chances are good that the damage will be to your vehicle more than the machine. So, the best solution is to cool your jets, enjoy the scenery, tell folks you got stuck behind a farm machine and they will both commiserate and laugh, because they have probably done the same thing. ¶Turns out, it is not the machinery on the road that is the problem. If you want to eat, you will have to tolerate farm work during busy farm seasons. The problem is our sense of being inconvenienced, which comes down to a sense of entitlement. ‘When I am in a hurry, everyone should be out of my way so I can make good time.’ But, the roads are not yours to control or command. Roads are for transportation of many sorts. I started with farm machines because they are bigger than cars and trucks so you can be annoyed without the prospect of being able to act on the road rage you may feel. ¶What about smaller things, you know, like bicycles? ‘Bicycles don’t belong on the roads; they belong on the sidewalk or bike paths.’ Unless of course you are on the sidewalk, in which case bicycles belong on the streets or bike paths. It isn’t the machine, the bicycle, it is the inconvenience of a bicycle either getting in your way or running you off the sidewalk. Again, it is the sense of entitlement we carry rather than the actual people and machines involved. ¶I took a break from writing to go to a dentist appointment. After a heavy rain with lightning and thunder some of the traffic lights were out. The driver’s manual says to treat malfunctioning traffic lights as four way stops. We did not. Several vehicles went through at once, sometimes blocking traffic flow from other directions. I was going to be late to my appointment, so I may have acted entitled even though I was in the process of writing this. ¶On the other hand, when I asked my friendly, neighborhood bike shop employee if there are as many people injured in car bike collisions as it seems in the bicycles forums I stalk, I was assured that there are more people who drive and ride safely than are involved in accidents. He added that about thirty percent of car bike accidents are from bikes riding against the traffic instead of with it. Accidents will happen as drivers show their resentment of the little punk bikes that get in the way of their big cars, and as bikers ride in ways that seemed good until someone gets hurt or killed. ¶Where else does entitlement keep us from sharing space with any of ‘those’ people? I am sure we each have our list of annoying people and things that get in our way when we are in a hurry, as well as those who rush us when we are calming ourselves by taking things more slowly for a moment. I am pretty sure no one is going to feel less entitled from having read this, maybe one of us will be able to call our annoyance by a different name – entitlement.