Private Thoughts Made Public

There’s not a lot that makes me want to stand up on my soapbox and do some ranting and raving. I’ve talked about a couple of things before, but those posts were an awful long time ago. Has nothing in the world annoyed me enough to write about it on here? Apparently not. However something happened on the way to work this morning that made me just a teeny bit annoyed, and for want of anything better to do I’ll write about it here.
I was travelling up the motorway, running a little bit later than usual (only by about 5 or 10 minutes) and not wanting to be too late for work was in the mood to put my foot down and make up for lost time. However I was prevented from doing this by a van in the outside lane 5 or 6 cars in front of me. This van was trying to overtake another van in the inside lane and failing dismally. Both vehicles were travelling at about 50 to 55 miles per hour.
Now for those of you non-Brits I should explain some things. British readers can skip along to the next paragraph if you wish. The speed limit on motorways (freeways) here is 70 miles per hour, which is a perfectly reasonable speed to do on a long straight road. Travelling at 55-60 is acceptable, and anything slower than that is as much of a hazard as traffic moving at 100. You are also not allowed to overtake on the inside, you have to pull out to overtake, then pull in again afterwards. Most motorways here have three lanes, some of the busier ones have four, but the one I was travelling on only has two.
So there I am, in a queue of (admittedly moving) traffic, watching this van up ahead try to get past the van on the inside lane. The van on the inside wasn’t slowing down to let him move in ahead, and the van overtaking wasn’t slowing down to pull in behind. And the rest of us are stuck behind the pair of them just waiting for a bit of flat or downhill road so that one of them could get some speed up. Three miles this went on for. Three interminable miles during which I was thinking, white-rabbit-style, “I’m going to be late, I’m going to be late”.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind traffic going a bit slower on the motorways if it has to. I don’t mind traffic travelling slowly if there’s too much of it on the road. What I object to is someone travelling too slowly in the outside lane, preventing the people behind from getting on with their journey, when all he has to do is swallow a bit of pride and move back in behind the vehicle he’s trying to overtake in the first place.
I’ve not mentioned white-van-man so far, and the only reason I haven’t mentioned him is because the van holding everyone up was blue. I wish it had been white, and I could have used artistic licence to make it white, but I decided to stick to the truth of the situation today.
I wonder, do these vans have a little needle in the seat that injects the driver with testosterone as soon as he sits down? Something that turns him into an aggressor who always has to win, without giving any regard to anyone else caught in the battle?