Deciding not to know

It's about a quarter to ten on a mid-week night (you know it's wednesday - the damn post is time stamped!) and my week of house-sitting for Sis2 is halfway over. The highway out the front is pumping with the flow of semi-trailers both in towards Brisbane and out towards the range and the inland highways. They're properly called a B-double Combination but of course are contracted to "B-Double" and I would like to think but cannot assert with any veracity (but shall put it out there anyway), to "B-Dub", my sister-of-the-wife-of -a-real-trucker access only gets me so far and no farther (even if I were to show my tatt it wouldn't help - wrong kind of ink for this crowd). Anyway, this is the only time day to day that you can be in the house and really notice that you're only a few hundred meters from a major transport artery. There's plenty of traffic during the day, but the general noises of the house cover most of it, and something about the traffic flow keeps it all a bit muted (I don't want to point any fingers here, but I think it's because during the day the speed limits are only flaunted by 10 or 20 kloms per hr). Tonight, as each night, it sounds like I'm under a runway for cargo planes that never leave the ground.

Australia leads the way in the use of B-Doubles. They can clear a port up to 17% more quickly (fascinating isn't it? Read the rest of that article here or delve deeply here go on, live a little). We're a big trucking country. Excuse me if I'm repeating myself about the importance of the B-Dub in the road transport world. They are the lion of the asphalt plains! The haemoglobin on our economic bloodstream! And after three days of sharing the road to and from work with the general public (a whole nother kettle of stinking rotten dead fish) and these giant trucks I was curious as to what they might weigh. I know how fast they're moving, and for some macabre reason I thought I might try and figure out what their momentum is (ie to see how dead I would be if they ran over my little car, even a bit). Sometimes as they change lanes there's a particularly terrifying wobble that moves through the load and I seem very close to a lot of very large wheels. Upon further reflection, I think I should not figure this out, even roughly. These are not the kinds of informational tidbits that will make the long drives easier, nor are likely to endear me to any random persons I may be in conversation with anytime in the next, say, 3 to 5 years.

Because that's the risk - there's some things you can't un-hear, un-see or un-know. Dropping even a single one of them into conversation can expose you as the fraudulent, freaky, or flat-out weird person that no-one wants to sit next to at a work function, live near, or invite to parties or go out for coffee with (unless, oh happy days, they too harbour curiosity that leads them into knowledge, strange philosophies and odd tastes in reading matter ... but there are other, safer secret handshakes with which to gather this kind of intel. "What do you think of that Dexter show?", "How cool is that Mars ice?!" but again I digress).

Knowing that the Panama Canal was first crossed on a Tuesday is an exactly fine tidbit to have floating around the noggin. It doesn't even have to be right! (I got this from a film and haven't even bothered to verify it, but have shamelessly used it on a number of occasions.) It can pop up when small talk is required but is too taxing in relation to the expected return and creates a small burst of conversational frisson to get over the hump into actual dialogue or out of the elevator. Telling people ways they can die in everyday situations - never popular. I'm unpopular enough without further handicap.