A Cabbie's Plea, a Tale of Foreign Circuitry And a Battle of the Brows

Andrew Simkins has a message for the pedestrians of Washington: Get back on the sidewalk. Andrew is a D.C. cabdriver, and as such he notices where Washingtonians stand while waiting for the crosswalk light to turn green. Often where they stand is in the street.

"It's been going on so long, it's become part of the culture," he told me the other day as he piloted his Bay Cab toward The Washington Post.

Once he'd pointed them out to me, I noticed them everywhere: People who'd stepped off the curb and were standing a foot or two in the street, as if they needed a nanosecond's head start when the light turned green.

"And then they look at you like, 'I dare you to hit me,' " he said.

Andrew's objection is that standing there is dangerous. A turning vehicle could clip you. A car could jump the curb. I noticed that some people who didn't wait in the street walked right up to the curb, their toes dangling over the edge as if they were Olympic divers. We Washingtonians are in a hurry.

The stroller-pushers are the worst, Andrew said.

"The people with little babies in the carriages are not aware of the cars in the street," he said. They use their prams like crowbars, pushing them into the crosswalk as if holding their place in line.

Andrew insists that he isn't anti-pedestrian. He's often one himself. He skates and cycles in Washington, too. He just wishes folks would stand back where it's safe.

Andrew told me that he will occasionally roll down his window and suggest that people not stand in the street. He said they usually respond with a suggestion of their own.

From Store, With Confusion

Samer Masri thought he got a pretty good deal on a laptop he ordered from the Circuit City liquidation Web site. The Gaithersburg retiree paid $350 for a 1.6GHz eMachines notebook with a 250GB hard drive. Then the laptop arrived. It was Russian.

It wasn't made in Russia. It was made for Russia. The qwerty keyboard had tiny Cyrillic letters next to the familiar Latin ones, and when the laptop was powered up, the text on the screen looked like something from "The Hunt for Red October." Samer asked his computer-savvy son-in-law, Keith Soares, if he could help.

Keith thought that if he could just stumble across the right pull-down menu, he could switch the language. No luck. When he called tech support and read them the machine's serial number, they said it didn't match their list and there was nothing they could do. When he told them the reason for his call -- the laptop is Russian! -- they checked a different list and said, um, yeah, that computer's not supposed to be sold in the United States.