Front, back, side, side, seasaw, pancake - with your switchbox in your lap at all times, you love hittin' switches. If you drive a bagged truck, it can be assumed that you have some sort of fascination with a vehicle moving up and down. You see a Honda and hit a switch. You get cut off by a Prius (again), and hit some switches. Perhaps you greet another truck with a quick pancake up. When you're bored on the freeway, you hit a switch. Your truck friends greet you with that "hit a switch" motion (even though they know there's a cop just out of sight), and you don't think twice about hittin' a switch. Sometimes you hit switches just because you can! While this vertical motion is perfectly normal to you, and you can spot a bagged vehicle in a parking lot while you pass by on a highway at 65mph, it occurred to me that perhaps this notion of "normal" may not be normal at all. It just may be that every time you hit a switch, someone is seeing it for the very first time ever. Someone may go home and describe at the dinner table this crazy thing that they witnessed, utterly fascinated and confused. Others might find themselves with a switchbox in their lap a year later. Some won't care; some will hate it. However, of all the reactions to air bags that one might encounter during the day, the notion of really scaring someone, thus greatly startling an innocent bystander, has led me to be a little more sensitive in my switch-hitting timing. Therefore, I do a quick sweep for nearby babies, and am equally concerned about elderly people. I try to warn my passenger that hasn't been in my truck before. Let's face it - if you're not expecting a vehicle to move up and down, it's going to freak you out, and distract you. So, with regards to certain populations, I try to keep in mind that if my truck is both loud enough to make my ears ring and quick enough to give me an adrenaline rush day after day, then the casual uninformed witness just might trip out, and I don't want that guilt on my shoulders. Don't get me wrong - there is a time and place. When my truck's suspension was hooked up via remote, I would lie in wait and hit it up when groups of super-cool dudes or clusters of trendy girls passed by. I now know that dudes can and do scream like chicks when startled, and that chicks... well, chicks scream like chicks and tend to huddle, and then giggle. Dudes play it off as if they suspected it the whole time.
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