Texting while driving is dumb. Everyone knows that, yet people still do it anyway. What’s more scary than a soccer mom behind the wheel of an oversized sports utility vehicle telling her friends about a sale at Macy’s as she’s driving on a road filled with pedestrians? How about a bus driver taking your child home while fiddling with her handset? Evelyn Guzman, a 47 year old woman from Stratford, Connecticut, is being charged with risk of injury to a minor and second-degree reckless endangerment after video recording equipment showed her sending and receiving a total of 1,068 text messages between April 6 and May 15 of last year. It gets even worse. Evelyn’s daughter, Jennifer Davila, who was elected as “bus monitor”, was charged with assault after the parents of a 9 year old autistic girl complained that their child was coming home with bruises nearly everyday. Jennifer was apparently picking on her. This isn’t the brightest family if you haven’t noticed by now.
Look, it isn’t that hard. Just wait until your car isn’t moving or until you’ve reached your destination. The fender benders you’ll save yourself, more importantly the lives of people you could potentially run over while on your way home from work, are not worth the 160 characters someone is sending you. When police in Wales released a video simulating what an accident resulting from texting and talking behind the wheel would look like, they made waves for using gratuitous amounts of violence, but that’s the real world. Hitting something while you’re going 60 miles an hour results in some serious injuries, the type that usually result in either death or long term disability. Most people say “it’s never going to happen to me”, but that excuse if what gets people in trouble with everything in life.
Luck be damned, just don’t be an idiot.