It's a little while before
rush hour and the traffic is moving along nicely. You're cruising along at 75 or 80 in the left lane of
I-270, a CD of your favorite tunes cranked up to an unholy decibel level, enjoying the absence of the standstill
traffic jams that characterize the
highway system around
Washington DC.
Suddenly, you see brake lights a few cars ahead of you and before you know it, the traffic speed in the left lane has slowed from 80 to 55. A line of impatient cars is stacked up behind some asshole in a Cadillac who's going 10 below the speed limit, and you can practically see the people buzzing past in the right lane thumbing their noses at you. The slow guy is right next to a monstrous 18-wheeler, making it impossible to pass him, and as the line of cars grows ever longer the seeds of road rage implant themselves in your heart.
What the guy in the Cadillac is doing is known in the Washington area as Nestoring, a practice named after one Mr. John Nestor. He wrote in to the Washington Post about ten years ago explaining that he enjoyed pulling into the left lane and setting his cruise control to 55, and if the cars behind him wanted to go faster than the speed limit, tough shit for them. The response his letter generated was the largest the paper had ever seen: enraged drivers attacked him in editorials, cops wrote in to tell him his driving was dangerous, and the general outrage lasted literally for months. Oddly enough no one has ever heard from Mr. Nestor since, prompting some to believe that perhaps one of the drivers he infuriated got so sick of him one day that he simply ran over him.