In the bathrooms at work

Okay, I know you’re thinking, “No good stories start with a title like that,” but just hang on a second. In the bathrooms at work, a safety sheet is posted inside the stall door about a different topic every month. During the summer it was West Nile Virus; we’ve also had microwave safety, office safety, and some other less-memorable topics. Anyway, this month is “Driver Fatigue and Road Trance.” It starts out by scaring you with statistics about how many people die from drowsiness while driving and then goes on to list the symptoms of driver fatigue. Later on, there are some helpful suggestions on how to prevent driver fatigue and “road trance,” and while reading them, I couldn’t help thinking about the numerous times that G. and I drove between MIT and our respective homes near Detroit, MI. We always drove through Canada since it was shorter than going through Pennsylvania and Ohio, but it was still about 13 hours, give or take. Here’s the two of us not following the safety suggestions:

- Plan a healthy, well-balanced diet (okay - show me one person you know that’s ever had a well-balanced diet in college)
- Aim for seven or eight hours sleep (maybe if you added up the sleep that each of us got during the night, it would add up to seven or eight…)
- Start out as early in the day as possible (sorry, most of our trips started around 9pm the night before we planned to arrive at home. If you’re driving home for Thanksgiving, wasting an entire day on the road makes the trip pointless. Driving during the night means you have more time at home.)
- Avoid driving alone whenever possible (well, we accomplished that, but I’m not sure if it counts when the other person, usually me, snored the entire way home)
- Keep trips to reasonable distances (what defines “reasonable”?)
- Try to avoid long night drives (see #3)
- Keep the driver’s area cool and well ventilated (does this include rolling down both windows all the way and sticking your head out in the middle of December while going 70 miles an hour to keep yourself awake?)
- Talk to passengers without being distracted (again - me, asleep)
- Take breaks every two hours or 100 miles (hmm… how about every 350 miles when we stopped for gas?)
- On break, get out of the vehicle and walk, jog, or stretch (does stumbling into the rest-stop bathroom count?)
- If it is essential, pull over and take a nap of no more than 20 minutes. Any longer will make you feel groggy. (maybe it was sometimes more like 2 hours…)

Funny, those trips always went differently when I drove home with my parents…

Okay, so we didn’t meet all of the bathroom safety tips. But watching Andy eat chocolate-covered espresso beans the entire way home once, stopping at 5am for Tim Horton’s in BFE, Canada, detouring through Niagara Falls, and the general hilarity that resulted from being cooped up in a car for an entire night made it all worth it.