Skills

Skills is the name of the most hard-case little fox terrier you will ever meet, who has established his home base with Dave and Melody in Toowoomba. His name came to mind the other day as I sat in the middle of the best bit of traffic gridlock that I have had the pleasure of encountering for a very long time.

I was scootering back from a dropoff of a patient and his daughter at the CSI Clinic. Street 271 is a main ring-road, commonly known as 'Dike Road' as it has been elevated a little, lifting it out of flooding chaos in the wet season. Dike Road is wide single lane each way, wide enough for three lanes of traffic to jostle in each direction in a busy period.

The view behind me (top) and coming the other way as things start to slowly move ...

The fun started with a concrete truck sitting in the middle of the road for a while, as it slowly positioned to reverse onto a building site property. This is where local skills kick in. The obvious way to get past a blockage is to go around. When that starts to block up, one just keeps going wider and wider ....

Of course, this works both ways. As the truck slowly manouvered into position, the scene was hilarious plus. We now have traffic six lanes deep on both sides of the road facing each other. No kidding, no arm-pulling. Susie has seen these same skills on a bridge spanning a local river - rush-hour, blockage and wall-to-wall traffic in a head-on standoff. It really is fun.

Within 15 minutes we had some action - a lonely policeman and his trusty whistle. Happily, he was blowing it on my side of the road. By sheer lung-power he opened up a 400mm gap. Hallelujah! I eventually slipped through happy in the knowledge of two things: some days all people are created equal (there were 200 Lexus 4wd's in that mess!) and that it would take at least an hour before the next concrete truck could get in position to create the very same skills-enhancing situation over again.