I left home this morning at the usual time, intending to get to work at my usual time. The trip turned out to be – something else.

by A.P. Lim (Published here with permission)

There was bumper to bumper traffic along the Nichols toll plaza heading north along the South Luzon Expressway, or SLEX, as it’s sometimes called – and that was a harbinger of things to come.

Traffic was so heavy it wasn’t just bumper to bumper. Given the crazy way bus drivers and truckers drive, traffic was also wheel to wheel. Here, a container truck’s cargo container was within arm’s reach of the passenger of a bus. There, a truck cut diagonally across the road, its broad flank filling up three of the four available lanes.

It wasn’t surprising, given the close quarters, that a bus sideswiped the side view mirror of a truck, resulting in a shouting match between the two drivers, which gave everyone around them something more interesting to look at other than the heat and the traffic.

The traffic jam started to flow after some distance, and when I passed by what was apparently the choke point, what did I see? A huge ten-wheeler and a sedan in a fender bender. And everyone seemed to be rubbernecking.

Mind you, I’d understand if it were a catastrophic accident, the spectacular kind which is seen in action movies, but – a fender bender?

From the place where the traffic started to jam up to the fender bender was somewhere between 100 – 150 meters. And I showed up an hour late for work, with everything else, other than the traffic jam, going smoothly.

Go figure.