Five Questions You Should Ask Before You Pick Up That Hitchhiker:

Even though it is often thrilling, the decision to pick up a hitchhiker carries with it a certain amount of risk. Not every person may be willing to pick up a hitchhiker as it is essentially a personal decision, and one that may not be wise for some individuals to practice. After all, inviting a stranger into your car on a dark and rainy night on a deserted stretch of highway requires a level of trust that, in extreme circumstances, might be taken advantage of.

The following questions are for the drivers. If the time does come, though, and you want to have a little fun by picking up a complete stranger and offer them a ride, please consider asking the hitchhiker these 5 questions to ensure a safe ride for the both of you.

1. Are you alive? This might seem at first like a strange question, but all too often, we hear about a friend of friend who offered someone a ride, usually to a cemetery, only to have them disappear near a gravestone that is carved with the name that they gave you. Why? Because they were not alive, you gave a ride to a ghost to their final resting place. Don’t waste your time giving rides to lazy spirits. Ask your hitchhiker if they are alive before they get in the car. If they are dead, tell them to just shuttle back to the afterlife on their own dime.

2. Are you human? It is vitally important to know if your passenger is even of the same species that you are. Often, the lonely stretch of highway is the hunting ground for some dangerous predators looking for their next meal. If they are not human, avoid giving rides to giant insects, werewolves, or carnivorous aliens. My personal policy, though it may seem unnecessarily draconian, is to only give rides to members of my species.

3. Are you a serial murderer, or do you suffer from any violent pathological tendencies that make you dangerous to me in any way? This is an easy way to screen out the most dangerous hitchhikers on the road. The only drawback is occasionally you will run into a pathological liar, and it will be impossible to tell if they are being honest with you. In those cases I recommend that you carry a portable metal detector and try to screen out any weapons they might want to bring into the car, such as axes, ice hooks, and meat cleavers. If you find them, make sure they place them safely in the trunk.

4. Would you submit to a drug screening such as a urinalysis or a sweat test? Illegal drugs have no place in the world of the safe driver. In the passenger seat, drugs can even turn a gentle hitchhiker into a dangerous sexual pervert. I advise that you carry with you drug screening tests of some type and ask your hitchhiker to submit to the test. Although it takes days, make sure you wait for the results, even if it means that you sacrifice the spontaneity of picking up a hitchhiker.

5. What kind of music do you like? The most important question of them all: There is nothing worse than picking up a hitchhiker, only to find out you have vastly different tastes in music. The odds are that you will both end up fighting over the radio. Do yourself a favor and only pick up those hitchhikers who enjoy listening to your favorite CD’s and radio stations.

10 Signs that You are a Bad Driver

Sometimes it is difficult to have the objectivity to examine your skills as a driver. In order to help you, I have compiled 10 indications that you might not be as good behind the wheel of a car as you might think.

1. Virtually every passenger who rides with you says “Wow. You are a really bad driver.” If your passengers, after begging for their lives and pleading for you to stop the car, routinely fall out of your automobile, having soiled themselves and still weeping, stumble away to call their parents just to tell them they love them, this might be a good indication that you need to improve your driving skills.

2. You consider traffic laws as “neat suggestions” or “great goals you might try to aspire to”. Attitude is everything, and this attitude makes you a bad driver. This attitude also makes you seem weird and lazy. Time to bone up on your attitude and your driving skills!

3. Hal’s Auto Body & Repair sends you flowers and a bottle of expensive Champagne, and then enrolls you in “The Cookie of the Month Club” to thank you for your continued patronage. Generally, Auto Body Shops do not do this for their average customer. They tend to reserve this to someone who is paying for their kid’s college tuition and their next European vacation.

4. When the court orders you to re-take a Defensive Driving Class, you notice that you are in all the videos they show as the “what not to do” example. Though this might be tempting initially, this is really not something to be proud of. It is a clear sign that even the DMV thinks your driving skills suck. You might want to consider working really hard to become a better driver.

5. You are considered a menace, even on the streets of cities such as Rome, Mumbai, and Mogadishu. And some of the world’s worst drivers are in these places. If that is the case, you might want to consider improving your driving skills.

6. People continually run screaming and leaping out of your way as you drive down the sidewalk. This might really want to start paying attention to this sign of poor driving skills in particular, as it might indicate you are probably not as good of a driver as you might like to believe.

7. You are actively recruited to become a NYC taxi driver. This means that you are a bad driver.

8. You cannot get employed as a NYC taxi driver. This means you are a terrible driver of epic proportions. The kind of terrible driver that legends are made of. You will go down in history as the worst driver in the world.

9. The points against your license are higher than the combined total of your IQ, your credit score, and the number of times you secretly have watched reruns of “The Nanny” and really enjoyed it. I am aghast. I am not sure what I find more appalling, your bad driving record or that you watch… and enjoy… reruns of “The Nanny”. Perhaps this is a symptom of a far greater psychological problem.

10. You think that everyone else on the road is an idiot. This is the definitive sign that you are a bad driver. No, this is proof that you are a terrible driver. Dude, really? I mean, seriously…really?? Unless your name is Einstein or Steven Hawking, the odds that everyone else is stupid and you are the only one who is not is highly, highly improbable. The more likely case is that you’re the idiot! Clearly, you need to learn how to drive or get off the road, dumb ass.