Do you carpool? Have you ever? Have anything weird go on? Would you do it again? Did you end up having to tell poor Larry he smells like he pooped his pants so you can't carpool with him anymore? EDIT: Adding the hitchhiking suggestion. Have you ever and/or ever given one a lift? I have never done either. But I have heard some pretty scary hitchhiking stories and no, I have never seen that movie and I never will. I'm a pussy and I'm ok with that.
Re: Carpooling with Larry is Stinky and Scary Car pooling has to be as draining on someone's psyche as public transportation. Sure, it generally means you are more into a white collar life/job but it just epitomizes the mindless motions of your boring fucking life. Ive never car pooled before.
Re: Carpooling with Larry is Stinky and Scary Maybe a better question is if anyone has hitchhiked or picked up hitchhikers.
Re: Carpooling with Larry is Stinky and Scary When I was in Paris, I took a day trip out to the countryside and missed the last bus that would take me to the train to get back to Paris. The town/station was a few miles away and after walking for a little bit I thought I'd try my hand at hitchhiking. I thought that since I was alone in a little frilly dress I'd have to be batting the murderers and rapists off with a stick but it turns out that even in France people have become wary of hitchhikers. It was a not-very-busy road out in the middle of nowhere so there weren't many cars passing anyway but none of them were even pretending to slow down as they passed. There was this emu farm on either side of me and just as I was thinking of taking my chances of breaking into the emu paddocks and running across the field to try and find whoever owned the place this grandfatherly type in a Mercedes pulled over and picked me up and I got to go zipping through the French countryside in the fanciest car I've ever been in. There wasn't even a hint of Creepy Old Manness about it either, which was appreciated. Ended up getting to the train station five minutes before the last train of the night.
I picked up a hitchhiker once. I was leaving work for lunch and there was a dude in the parking lot asking for a ride. I'm not sure why I obliged. Maybe he just looked like he was an ok dude who was down on his luck, so I gave him a ride. I did have my carry weapon next to me and out of sight though. The only time I've ever hitched was in Big Bend National Park. My buddy and I left his car and did a 3 day one way hike ending up in the Chisos Basin. We had agreed on the plan before setting out but when we got there I was too pussy to proposition strangers for a ride. I was only 21 at the time. It took a long time, but we ended up getting a ride back to the car from some nice geologist.
I have been tempted many, many times to stop along the side of the road for a car that's broken down. Then my brain wakes up, screams RAPE!, and I continue on. The guilt of not helping a stranger in need fades exponentially faster than scars from a burly rape and/or murder.
Not sure if this qualifies as a hitchhiker per se, but back in college I had given a ride to a friend to a party. As she gets out and goes in, this guy walks around the side of the house (college-aged) and asked for a ride into town. He must have seen me hesitate because he holds up his hands and says, "I'm not going to rape you." Welp, sounded convincing to me, hop on in! So I gave him a ride into town. He did not, in fact, rape me. I don't know why I did it.
I've only picked up someone I didn't know hitchhiking once. It was around 1am, I was on my way home from a night out, and I was driving through a sketchy part of a sketchy town when I saw a guy in a suit with his thumb out. He claimed he was out with friends, they left,his car wouldn't start or some shit, but he clearly wasn't from this town, and I'd never heard of muggers putting on suits and hitchhiking as a ruse, so I gave him a lift. The last time I was asked by someone to give them a ride was a few years later, outside a strip club. The guy was clearly hammered as he approached my car, and told me he needed a lift to Wyoming. We were only a few miles off the interstate, so that could have been true. We were also in New Jersey.
Lately I've been more inclined to offer people rides (I live in a small-ass town) as a way of paying it forward because I got a couple of lifts from strangers on occasion while I was waiting for the State of Maine to let me have a driver's license. I haven't, but it's the thought that counts...right? The one experience I've got with hitchhikers was in 2008. I was at the tail end of a two-month road trip through the US, and I was in Santa Barbara over a Wednesday/Thursday night. I'd gone out on the Wednesday and had met a girl at a bar who was fascinated by my accent/story and asked me if I needed a tour guide the next day. She had great tits, so I said yes. Anyway, true to her word, she drove me around a bunch of places and we had dinner later on. She then decided we should go to some hot springs "a little ways out of town" (Big Caliente, for those familiar with the area). She picked up another friend of hers and away we went. I didn't realize that it was in the middle of a national park, and when the blacktop turned into unsealed dirt road I started to get a little nervy, given a) no one knew where I was, b) I didn't know either of these girls past their first names, c) I had every single one of my valuable/identifying possessions with me and d) had no cell signal. It didn't help matters that they were joking about murdering me in the woods, and it was past 10pm. On the way we passed a truck pulled over by the side of the dirt road, and there was no one around it. We eventually got to the hot springs, had a good old soak, then decided to head back. The abandoned truck was even spookier on the way out at 12:30am...and then about a mile down the road we came across two hitchhikers. As we approached them, we conferred about whether or not we should stop to pick them up. I'm naturally cautious and I've read far too much Stephen King so I voted against it. Unfortunately the majority ruled and the girls were both "free spirits" so we let the poncho-wearing hitchhikers in. I stayed on my guard all the way back to Santa Barbara, but ultimately it turned out they were just smelly musicians whose truck had broken down on the way back from the hot springs. In short, I'm a pussy. EDIT: From rep: Indeed. I banged the first one (with the rack) about four days later in LA. She was extremely rough.
My friend in college had a rustic cabin in north central New Mexico, near the town of Chama. Its a ranching community and defines out in the middle no where. We were out getting supplies (more beer) for the night and my friend who was driving noticed these hitchhikers. These guys were middle aged, ragged and dirty. So my friend who is a bit stupid, thought it'd be a great idea to give them a ride. I was pissed and unnerved to say the least. We ended up giving them a ride to a random trailer park and they were on their way. I was thinking the whole time, this is how I'm going to die, fucking great. Being overly cautious is annoying, picking up random drifters in New Mexico is just stupid.
There was literally no upside to your story - I mean aside from not getting carjacked and/or murdered. Though I'm starting to understand why you might have that anxiety you were talking about in the WDT, given the people who seem to be in your life.
What are you talking about? Giving strangers a ride is a huge reward. We helped two people, thats pretty awesome.
I was coming home from a vacation at 3 AM, and watched the only other car on the road blow a tire about 1/4 mile in front of me. We were probably 20 miles from any kind of civilization, so I pull in behind the car. This absolutely beautiful girl gets out of the drivers seat looking really upset and starts babbling a little, about how she was driving home from college and she didn't know anyone around there and her brother didn't put the jack back in her car last time he rotated her tires. So I go get my jack and as I'm coming back I hear her in the drivers seat, "...no, I'm okay. No, a cute guy stopped to help me. *giggle*" We chat and laugh a lot as I changed her tire. I told her to keep the jack in case she had another problem. She gets really close to me, puts her hand on my arm, looks up at me and says, "Is there anything I can do to thank you?" And I think about the fact that I'm pretty serious about the girl I just started dating, and I smile and tell her to just drive safely, and she kind of flatly says, "oh." and leaves. And I'm an idiot. I've been with the girl I was just dating then for nearly a decade now, so it wasn't all bad. I do wonder, though, if there's a girl out there that tells the same story except it ends with the guy rejecting her.
Okay...? Gosh, stranger on the internet, I sure hope there's a way I can convince you my story is real!
Yeah, I mean, who comes home from vacation at 3 am? The rest of it, totally believable, though. I have a truck and carry a tow strap, jumper cables, can of Fix-a-flat. I stop and help people all the time. Like, once a month, probably. I live about 20 miles out of town, and there's lousy cell phone coverage in part of that. I've towed as many people as I've changed flat tires. I've been offered payment plenty of times, which of course I refuse, but I've never been offered the kind of "payment" Binary suggested. Oh well.
Never carpooled, and only gave a stranger a ride once. We lived in NH at the time and a major storm had hit. We were on our way home from picking the kids up and we saw a car down in the ditch off the side of the road. A little ways up, we saw a guy walking (trudging was more like it) so I stopped and gave him a lift home. He wasn't really hitchhiking, I just stopped, asked if that was his car and offered him the ride.
There is a good Samaritan law in Germany, if you see someone stopped on the side of the road with their emergency triangle out you have to stop and help if no one else has. I've stopped a couple of times to help people out, cell service is spotty and I'm somewhat handy so if it's just a flat or whatever I can usually lend a hand. I've hitchhiked before, quite a few times actually. The way I see it, there are so few hitchhikers nowadays it isn't like someone is going around looking for people to hitchhikers to murder. Maybe someone will rob you as a crime of opportunity if you're in a shitty area, but I carry a knife on me and I'm bigger than most people and can fight so it generally doesn't worry me. I don't really have many good stories, just some interesting conversations with people, usually older people are the ones who stop.