Stubbornness Is Digging In

I’m a lorry driver and drive a tipper trailer for a living. I’m at a jobsite that is more or less across the street from a kindergarten. The site is an elevated lot with a wall separating it and the street. A digger, clearly visible from anywhere on the street, is on the lot loading rocks on a trailer standing on the street no more than a metre from said wall. While we have no guards, there are signs in both directions telling pedestrians to go on the other side of the street.

I’m standing behind the lorry being loaded talking to my colleague who is driving it. He has a passenger who has decided to stay in it. While we’re talking, we suddenly see a woman with a kid in each hand hurriedly emerge from between the trailer and the wall and then cross the street towards the school while the two of us stand there mouth agape, too stunned to say anything.

We go to the front to see if the sign is still there, which it is, and we talk to my colleague’s astonished passenger who tells us he told the woman repeatedly that she could not walk there but she ignored him. One of her little girls however did react, stopped, and told her mother they shouldn’t walk there but the mother grabbed her arm and dragged her along.

This was a few years ago and I have since stopped being surprised at the sheer stupidity of people but really, did she really need a someone to tell her you do not walk between a digger and the lorry it is loading?