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Life & Arts

Bypass road rage with 'Bump'

My 8 Bits

Jason Poland

Sitting in the bumper-to-bumper carpet that paves Highway 59 at rush hour can make your face as red as the sea of brake lights in front of you. Have you ever wished your car could just jump over all the other cars? You've got things to do. You can't wait for some soccer mom to figure out which lane will get her brats to the Gymboree faster. And maybe when you land from your jump, you can smash that Buick that hasn't turned its blinker off for the last five exits and be awarded 100 points. 

Whatever the developers of Bump 'n' Jump were thinking when they conceived a game in which the object is to drive other motorists off the road, they must've had a grizzly bear of a commute into the office.

The actual plot of Bump 'n' Jump is vague: A purple hummer peels out with someone inside screaming "Help!" and your red car follows in hot pursuit. Anyone who drives a purple hummer has to be really obnoxious, and that they've kidnapped someone gives you just cause to take a detour from your morning commute and play vigilante. But much like an obese Ben & Jerry's customer racing to get the 10th hole punched on his get-one-free card before they close, your end goal is clouded by the red-hot road rage that overtakes you. 

An innocent Cadillac-driving grandmother hurtles to her fiery demise as you bump her over the guardrails. She was guilty of driving too slow in the fast lane, and when you've got road rage, every lane is the fast lane.

Driving in a city like Houston, it's no surprise that more than half of all drivers on the road suffer from road rage. A recent Gallup Poll reported that 42 percent of motorists are worried about road rage, more than the 32 percent worried about drunk driving. As long as rednecks have gun racks in their pickup trucks, there's reason to worry. Aggressive driving accounts for 28,000 highway deaths, and the growth rate of violent, aggressive driving increases almost 10 percent annually. 

Being first in line to see the next obscure foreign film may seem more important that whatever it is all these other morons are out driving around for, but Mrs. Kilpspinger spent all morning clipping coupons for the sale at Mervyn's and she's hankering for some new tube socks for the kids.

New driver's licenses are issued at a rate double the population increase, which means the number of idiot drivers on the road is increasing exponentially. Even with all the construction in Houston and other metropolitan traffic meccas, the 1 percent increase in roads since 1987 has not kept up with the 35 percent increase in traffic. Yelling at the TV doesn't fix it, and getting mad about traffic doesn't help either. Since there's nothing you can do you about it, you might as well realize that driving isn't like teleporting. It might take longer than five minutes to get where you're going. Maybe you ought to skip checking your myspace.com account for the sixth time today and leave on-time for school for once. You may be able to bump soccer moms off the road and jump over slow-moving grandmas in Bump ‘n' Jump, but you'll just have take a chill pill when you're stewing in brake lights on Loop 610. It's the day when cars come standard with a jump button that you'll really need to worry.
 

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