It has come to my attention that there are a great many idiotic and irritating drivers out there wreacking havoc on the patience of other drivers. You might be one of them! Here’s a short driving quiz for you to figure out if you are:

1. You turned right 10 minutes ago. Your turn signal:

a. Was turned off 9 minutes 55 seconds ago.

b. Is still blinking.

c. Hasn’t been touched in three years.

2. You need to turn onto a residential street. How long does it take you to make the turn?

a. 5 seconds.

b. I come to a complete stop, peer at the street sign, and take 3 minutes to turn, allowing a nice long line of cars to form behind me.

c. 1.4 seconds on two wheels.

3. You need to turn onto a street. Someone is coming along at what looks to be 10 miles over the posted speed limit. What do you do?

a. Wait until they pass, then pull out.

b. Peel out in front of them, and then slow down to a nice prudent five miles below the speed limit. They don’t need to go so fast.

c. Barrel out in front of them as though Steven King’s Langoliers were after you, and zoom quickly out of sight, aiming for pedestrians as you go.

4. When someone ahead of you is going slowly, and you are in a hurry, what do you do?

a. Tailgate and curse.

b. Remark to your passenger that people drive too fast nowadays and make a mental note to write a letter to the editor about it.

c. Pound on the horn and try to force them on the sidewalk.

If you chose mostly As, or Cs, your fellow drivers appreciate your style. If you chose mostly Bs, congratulations! You probably own a Buick, wear your hat three inches above your ears and never experience road rage!

Unfortunately, the rest of us hate you. If we transported you all to Iraq, the war would be over in a matter of minutes because Saddam Hussein’s head would have exploded in frustration from trying to get to a high-level meeting on time.

I firmly believe that if car companies began installing an inter-vehicle message system into their automobiles, blood pressure averages would drop. Just imagine: you are late for a test or your job and getting later by the minute because the Methuselah ahead of you is puttering along on his way to get his bifocals cleaned. You are wishing you had “go-go-gadget” wheels that would stretch to six feet high so you could zoom over the slow driver.

But instead of honking your horn or suffering a stress-induced seizure right there on Highway 53, all you do is press a button that sends an insulting message like “The speed limit is 50 stupid!” to the other car, and you instantly feel better.

This sort of system could doubly benefit those of us with smaller cars. Most of us have been getting ready to pull out of a parking lot or turn onto a street, starting to look to the sides to see if it is safe to pull out, and woosh, some behemoth SUV the size of Crete will pull up right beside us. Unless our cars are equipped with a periscope, large vehicles effectively block our view of the roads, other stores, the sun, etc. But with a communication device, instead of only being able to mutter darkly to yourself, you could message the other driver, “Back off lard butt!” or at the very least ask them if any cars are coming. Wouldn’t that be great?

Oh, I know that I am not a perfect driver. Two weeks ago, I nearly drove up an off-ramp, much to the excitement of everyone in the car. So I know I would be getting plenty of these messages myself (“What are you doing stupid?”), but it would be so worth it to give them to other bad drivers.

So the next time you begin to grind your teeth in frustration at the bozo in front of you, unclench your jaw, take a deep breath, stop tailgating and think to yourself, “One day, perhaps I will be able to tell this moron what I think of him.”

And then get out of my way.