Personalities

I did a lot of driving this week, both around the city and back and forth from Harrisburg on the turnpike. For days it’s been pouring rain like some kind of supremely disappointing apocalypse. Driving so much in heavy rain in an old car made me pay close attention to how well certain things were holding up under the conditions, especially the windshield wipers (I need new ones, I found out). Fixating on these things about my own car got boring, so I started examining other cars on the road out of sheer boredom.

I remembered a “personality test” devised by a girl I dated a couple years ago. Whenever it rained, she’d look at oncoming traffic and see how fast the windshield wipers were moving. She used this information, coupled with the severity of the precipitation, to determine the driver’s disposition. If it was only drizzling and the windshield wipers were blazing back and forth, the person was neurotic. A heavy downpour and slow moving wipers meant the driver was laidback.

This was much fun for me, as none of the available wiper speeds on my car suited me, so I resorted to manually clicking the wipers on, then off, then back on again, at my own pace. I don’t know whether there’s a personality type for that, but there should be.

I’ll mention here that I recently took an online Myers-Briggs test and placed as an ENTP (surprise). Even the verbose description mentioned nothing of windshield wiper speeds, though.