Horn Please

This driver is very quiet. The last one…not so much. He honked a lot. There were cows in the road, people in the road, children in the road. Oncoming traffic in the road. And slow people to pass. Lots of reasons to honk.

I wondered how much he was honking, so I counted honks for 20 minutes. Guess how many times he honked in an hour? Really, take a moment. Guess.

285 honks per hour.

There seemed to be some rules, or patterns at least:

• If you are passing someone, honk continuously until you are out of the blind spot.
• If there are animals or children ahead, honk so they don’t walk in front of you.
• If you are driving through a town, honk so people know you are coming.
• If you want to drive faster, honk so people get out of your way
• If someone is driving right at you, honk so they know you mean business. This was quite often since our road was usually only 1.5 cars wide and we shared it with big trucks.
• If you are going around a bend, honk so people know you are coming.

In truth there were a lot of sacred cows in the road, looking for a passerby to make some wind to blow the flies off their backs. We wondered how many cows there were, so we counted these too. Guess how many.

235 cows per hour.

Granted, they were not all in the road. But they could have been.