It was on a work trip with my boss in northern Saskatchewan in the dead of winter, meeting with clients in Prince Albert. We drove up from Saskatoon in the morning in a rental car for the initial meet & greet. Did I mention that she was a control freak and a terrible driver? She insisted on driving, and even on a clear, sunny morning with perfect roads it was a white-knuckle journey for me. She was flying out of Saskatoon that evening, so we had to get her back south for her flight and then I was staying behind to carry out the project. It was already dark by late afternoon at that latitude, and it was snowing and blowing like crazy, as we headed out for what in good weather is a 1.5 hour drive. Did I mention that she was a control freak? Did I also mention that she was a terrible driver?
I won’t bore everyone with all the details, but it was the most terrifying time I have ever spent in a car, and I have been in a hell of a lot of hairy automotive situations in my life. The most dangerous part was how she would tailgate – and even try to pass – semis on a single highway in a fucking blizzard. I reminded her several times to slow down and maintain an interval with the vehicle ahead, and she would back off briefly, but then in a minute or so we’d be right back in the rocking chair of death behind a semi. If any of those semi drivers even had the word “brakes” pass through his mind, we would have been underneath him.
I’ll cut to the chase – it got to the point that I told her I was not going to allow her to kill me, and if she didn’t listen to me immediately, I would be resigning the instant we got out of the car – if we lived that long. She thought I was joking, so I had to make it clear that I was absolutely, deadly fucking serious. She did one of those “ha-ha, oooh, why so serious?” things that people like her do, but she slowed down and drove carefully the rest of the way. I told her that a new condition of my employment from then on was that if we ever had to share a car again, I was driving.