jstrom and Hutchie are both programmers, maybe you're confusing me with them?
Not really wanting to start "the hi-viz discussion" again, but I have a story...
This morning I was riding behind a bloke on a 55 plate VTX with straight through pipes. They sound lovely when he accelerates, idles along or decelerates. Very loud, I could hear them well with earplugs in with a quiet Shoei Qwest helmet. He was wearing a yellow fluorescent BOX helmet and his jacket and backpack were both full yellow hi-viz with very little black in between. He was highly visible and very easy to hear. He was filtering, like me, and he constantly had to stop because people kept drifting over to the line he was riding on, seemingly oblivious that he was there. He got annoyed a bit and started to give the bike a rev here and there to get people to hear him. They'd move over then and I had enough gap to get through easily so I stayed behind him as he wasn't holding me up. I followed him for a few miles, he got off at the same junction I did onto the A404. Traffic was pretty smooth on the A404 until near a roundabout where it always slows down. He started filtering as I would have, same thing, like people are completely blind to him. A big red van actually drifted over so much that the bloke had to stop the bike at the nose of the van, look at the driver and eventually use the horn to get the driver to steer away. Only the driver decided he's going to steer towards the VTX even more. The bloke on the VTX gave it a squirt and got through, but I was close behind him as I had to slow for him. I got on the horn too, I'm not as wide so I knew I could get through easily even with him steering my way (he was crawling with the rest of the traffic.) Knowing I could get past him and angry that he's pushing me towards the car on the right (who by now had decided to steer way from the van to make space for us) I whacked his mirror with my left hand going by. In my anger I was hoping I could braek the glass, but it flipped forward and banged loudly against the van's side before springing back, nothing broken. The noise it made combined with the horn just before I hit his mirror and the sudden realisation that there was another bike next to him that he's steering into made him swerve over to the left away from me and the next bike behind me got through easily. The van driver didn't even think to get on his horn, he looked shocked. Mission accomplished.
This is one of my first experiences of people actually steering towards a bike with intent. I was a bit surprised that I reacted the way I did, I'm normally not someone that goes over into physical action even though I joke about it. Still angry thinking about it, that kind of action is with intent to harm and just because someone chooses a motorcycle as his mode of transport
