How to drive a point home without indicating.
2026-08-16
Picture this - it’s a sticky hot afternoon, you are stuck in homeward traffic, sweat running down your back, the car’s aircon barely keeping your face from burning up.
Finally the plugged up traffic-jam slug starts to stretch a little and opens to a crawl. Suddenly an asshole, two lanes over to your right, pushes his BMW saloon in, without using his bloody indicator!
Fuming, you lean on your horn, scream “asshole!” and take a picture of his car and tweet. Your hundred and twelve followers see #asshole-drivers; then their followers do, some retweets and more photos, and soon after BMW drivers around the world are being insta-assholed.
The asshole’s name is Bob A. Booey.
Bob is a generally pleasant, easy-going guy. This morning, however, his wife made a comment while he was getting dressed. She insisted that he was working too hard and not paying enough attention to her. He thought she read too many romance novels and he was doing what he could and that hard work had to be done to build a good life.
Local, recent sediment: That morning’s accusation sat with him the whole day. It came from someone Bob trusts and struck directly at his own settled image of being attentive and caring.
After storming out of the bedroom, he stared numbly at the cereal box, trying to find hope in the added vitamins and iron that come with the sugar, corn and milk. This yearning for a better day was something he’d clung to ever since he was a child, but now in his forties, it rang hollow.
Lifelong sediment: Bob has always read cereal boxes since childhood, first looking for toys, then later for nutritional reassurance that he was going to have a good day.
Last week he got the findings of his first tax audit and had three years’ interest due the next month. Seeing the news on TV of the latest political wiener picking a fight with a foreign nation with that money made him feel betrayed.
Economic sediment: Years of tax bills and political pimping on TV have taught Bob to see his tax money being fed into a bureaucratic meat grinder at the whim of the latest egotistical commander-in-briefs.
When Bob eventually got to work that day, he got called in by his manager, Rick E. Raccoon. Rick told Bob that corporate sent a memo that said his department needed to “improve operational efficiency” and he understood the memo to mean he had to fire two people by next week to meet their demands.
Work sediment: A missed KPI rolled downhill - the veep called a meeting, the meeting spat out a memo, and the memo got Babel-fished through the corporate hierarchy until Rick grokked efficiency == firing two people. Past praise from HR for him letting someone go, sedimented in Rick; he now sees himself as an ‘efficient’ manager.
Bob carried his lifetime of unfulfilled cereal advertising, his wife picking that morning to doubt his commitment, the latest political wiener spending his money on shit nobody asked for, and Rick threatening his livelihood because corporate sent a memo into the traffic with him. None of his usual easy-going nature softened his situational frustration and he was halfway into a panic attack when he turned into your lane without indicating.
Sediment in action: That day’s accumulated sediment bundled together with the hot box of the car and the looming prospect of having to face his wife in thirty minutes. Bob tipped into a blur of flight and panic, noticed his turnoff too late and changed lanes without indicating.
So you saw Bob’s asshole act and fully assembled a self-righteous prick who goes where he wants because he drives a BMW, not wrong, but hellishly shallow.
Your sediment: Years of jokes, posts, stories and personal encounters supplied you with a ready-made shortcut: rich, self-righteous alpha pricks drive BMWs.
Your horn was as authored as his lane change. Given his inputs, he swerved; given yours, you raged. Same machine, different sediment.
Observation becomes sediment: You photographed Bob, called him an asshole and posted it. Ranking and repetition carried that judgment into the group pile, which made it to Wikipedia’s “most hated drivers” page.
Sediment becomes lens: Some of that pile will enter search results, recommendation systems and training corpora. The next lens will be ground partly from judgments made through the previous one. The answer to your next prompt about BMW drivers might reflect that sediment back to you. Your own tweet, staring at the future you through a bucket of sediment and lenses.
Oh, the humanity of it all. The book-cover-judgment reveal is not anything new. All the zen, turn-the-other-cheek, see-the-context, belly-breathing and remove-emotion-from-conflict on the self-help bookstore shelves already says so.
But that context was fabricated too.
Writer sediment: But Bob was fabricated out of my gray mousse: firsthand experience of assholes without indicators (taxi drivers more likely), impotent rage at tax dollars feeding Uncle Underpants’s whims, marriage, lies on cereal boxes, management jokes and panic. My sediment generating some form of coherent surface to tie the loop, lens and sediment party together.
Reader sediment: You are reading this, mushing it up with your sediment. You possibly reconsidered the assholes in the BMWs, or more likely wondered what went wrong in your life that you ended up reading this nut job’s post. Either thought will settle into your sediment and carry into the next thing you observe and how you will eventually act.
Tada! The post is not the scoop; it is also trapped in the loop. People and floating-point matrices are hiding in the →arrows←. The fine print about how little either of them chose is in the →layer cake←.