One of my pet peeves is people who talk on their cell phone while driving and become oblivious to everything around them, therefore doing things that endanger the rest of us. Just recently a lady pulled out of a parking lot across two lanes of traffic into the turning lane causing us to have to brake abruptly. Sure enough she was talking on a phone unaware that she had just brought two lanes of traffic to a halt. It was a just luck that none of the cars rear-ended each other or crashed into her. She never knew!
This week-end a train engineer decided to send a text message to some teen-age friends while he was driving a commuter train in California. Text-messaging is probably worse than just talking because it requires you to look at the phone. (if you text like me, you have to look for an extended period of time) This decision cost 25 people their lives and sent 135 to the hospital. How sad to watch a wife tell how she never got to say good-bye to her husband, or to see the rows of police officers line up to remove the body of their fellow officer who was on her way home. So many families were affected and lives changed by this engineer's decision.
Technology is a wonderful thing. Cells phones allow us to keep in touch with our families and friends, computers make the world a smaller place and allow us to have information at our fingertips. But, we must learn to use technology responsibly and safely. This is a lesson that I have been trying to instill in my students when making blog posts, using e-mail and sending text messages. I am going to use this tragic example to remind them of how our actions can affect others.
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