Hiway safety (or: lost in Watts)

[Termite]

Modern women tend to have little SA, and malfunctioning danger proximity alarms.

Mrs. Termite has a Garmin. She generally carries it when going out of town. She also has a Colt Detective Special, which she has been taught to use, but may or may not carry it in her vehicle. I also have an emergency road kit that is supposed to stay in her vehicle, but often she will remove it beacause "it's in the way."

A while back I reminded her that I will do all that I reasonably can to protect her, but that if she ignores basic good sense and gets herself in a bad situation due to her own foolishness, she has no one to blame but herself.

[skb12172]

A while back I reminded her that I will do all that I reasonably can to protect her, but that if she ignores basic good sense and gets herself in a bad situation due to her own foolishness, she has no one to blame but herself.

These all sound very familiar to me. It seems that many modern women have the survival instincts of hamsters. Though, in all fairness, I've found modern college students (male and female) aren't much better.

This has inspired me to start a new thread. I'll call it "Situational Awareness or Paranoia." You'll see, it'll make sense.

[Aaron]

I wonder sometimes if it's a chromosome thing. My wifey has had the benefit of both training from the military (Navy security) and personal tutoring from numerous friends of ours and myself. Yeah, she has great situational awareness when we're miles away from home or in an unfamiliar part of town, but the rest of the time? Forget it. Just grocery shopping with her makes me want to pull hair out and she'll walk, turn into an aisle, etc without looking around at all, just staring at something on the shelves. I often have to stop her from running into people or being run into.

[blackeagle603]

Most of the above doesn't apply to my wife.

Situational awareness she has in spades as it relates to security.
Directional awareness? Not so much.

She'll do fine 95% of the time and then panic and go into brainlock. She's tough, grew up in a tough neighborhood, was the token white kid in her school. Her public facial expression puts off people who don't know her and don't know she has a soft center. Has that hard poker face look you develop without even knowing growing up in that type of place.

She had to run home every day through 8th grade to keep from getting mugged for being white -- didn't always make it safely. Only thing saved her from worse was her older brother who was a bad hombre at the time. After that, our first homes in VA and San Diego were typical rental ghettos with associated crime, gangs etc.

She drives big vehicles and a stick better than 9 of 10 men. She's been driving church vans/buses to camp in the mountains etc for nearly 30 years. That's why we still have the Excursion (driving church groups) even though the family doesn't need it anymore with grown kids. So no worries in a tight spot when she's driving. She has a heavy vehicle and can handle it well. In this case I just had to remind her to get moving and keep moving.

On the upside, suddenly the vehicle handgun lockbox that came UPS last week doesn't look so silly to her.