October 1999

It was on a Sunday and Frank, my brother-in-law, and I had been in the south of Holland for the BMX-federation, doing some official thing.
We were on our way back already and we were some 30 minutes away from home. We drove off the freeway onto a provincial road when a black BMW overtook us with a bit too exaggerated speed.
First reaction (human reaction) of both of us was to look who was in the car and when we saw it we looked at eachother and couldn't help but spontaneously burst out laughing.

A little background story:
In Holland it appears to be incredibly tough if you have your own car, you — as a young driver with a fast(-looking) car — hang to the right, supporting your left hand on the most upper right side of the steering wheel. Basically when a person like that passes you and you look through his/her rear window, what you see is someone sitting — or hanging — between the driver's seat and the passenger's seat.

Anyway... Not only was it exactly that what Frank and I saw, in this case it was in such an overdone way that it was totally hilarious, but the thing that made it even more hilarious was that the guy was hanging so far out of his driver's seat that he couldn't see in his rear view mirror anymore and he had adjusted its position so that it was completely diagonal, matching his position in the middle of the car.
Frank and I weren't really sure of the use of his overtaking-action, except for that probably the guy felt really superior with it. Time he didn't gain with it at least, because 1 km further down the road we were waiting for the same red light.
The guy with the BMW stood waiting on the left lane, and we were waiting on the right lane. The guy with the BMW apparently was a bit scared that his engine would get cold, because he kept on pumping the gas pedal while we were waiting for the light to turn green (maybe he also wanted to impress us with the sound of the engine of the car, but I'm not sure).
Actually... I don't know what the guy was thinking. Did he really think that we would get ourselves into a competition with him about who had the fastest car? Probably he did. But we weren't planning any competition and so we just stood there waiting until the light turned green, listening to the guy pumping his gas pedal and laughing about him making a fool of himself.
And then the light turned green. We heard an extra pump of the gas pedal and then all of a sudden nothing anymore... While Frank and I slowly drove up towards the right onto the crossing, we looked at eachother and burst out laughing again, because our tough guy had just killed his engine in his anxiety to speed away from the traffic light. Talking about making a fool of yourself...
But then it still wasn't over. The guy must've felt like he had to prove that he wasn't really that stupid, so we heard the engine roar back to life and the shreeking sound of the spinning tires on the asphalt and of him pulling away with his car from the traffic lights. We weren't gone all too far yet, so he could still make it to get in front of us before the two lanes merged to one.
So with a speed that was way to high for the curve he came rushing after us. And because of his high speed he drifted to the outside of the curve, hit the pavement in the middle of the road that separated our two lanes from the approaching ones and was rocketed diagonally back to the right lane, almost crashing our car.
And even if this was an almost-accident, Frank and I couldn't stop laughing. Couldn't stop laughing for the coming 20 minutes. Every time we stopped laughing, and looked at eachother again, we would fall back in an unstoppable laughing-fit.
Some people just don't get it...