If you've ever wondered how long it would take a parking ramp full of Minnesotans to sit without making any progress whatsoever toward the exit before someone honks their horn, I have your answer: 24 minutes.
We'd come from a Convention Center event, backed out, joined the line. Nothing moved for 23 minutes. Fury had long since ebbed to despair. Finally, someone honked. The honk echoed through the ramp, bounced off the concrete, went from floor to floor; we all nodded, thinking he speaks for me, that one. Not that I'd honk, but I understand.
A few minutes later, after nothing had moved and everyone's gas tank was down an eighth, someone honked again — and it was joined by another complainant, a different horn with its own plaintive bleat, and the second horn laid it on hard. Thus emboldened by the madness of crowds, I joined in, tooting my horn three times, and this seemed to be the signal for everyone else on the level to lay into their horn until it sounded like a New York intersection.
I turned to my daughter: "Did you see how Daddy enabled the formation of a mob there?" She nodded. Well, I had. One horn is a rebel; two are troublemakers, but the third horn gives license to everyone else to lose themselves in the anonymity of consensual fury. But like any riot, it spent its self and died away.
Not one car had moved an inch.
"What is going ON," my daughter fumed.
"If I had to guess? Someone called in sick so there's one person staffing the booth. The mechanism that raises the gate broke, and someone got out to raise it, but he was so furious he had a heart attack, and then the accumulated carbon monoxide overwhelmed the person in the booth before they could call for help. For all we know there's an ambulance up there right now, helping them, so we must be patient and calm. See how calm I am? Calm."
She noted that I was not only gripping the steering wheel quite tightly, I had actually snapped it off the steering column.