Don’t judge me, but I regularly text while driving

When Rob Long was rear-ended by a driver who was distracted by their phone, he confessed that he does the same thing.

Hollywood is such a deeply amoral place that it’s a rare treat to come face-to-face with a genuine, undeniable morality tale. But when you do, you have to make the most of it.

In California, it’s illegal to send text messages while driving. While I know on a deep, fundamental level that this makes sense, I nevertheless often catch myself sneaking peeks at my text messages and emails while cruising along at 95 kph on the local highways. That’s not all: I have been known, despite the law, good sense, and the shrieks of the people in the car with me, to reply to those emails and text messages.

“You’re going to kill yourself or somebody else,” people tell me.

But it’s irresistible. The phone makes its “message received” noise, and no matter whether I am changing lanes, passing a school bus, whatever – I check it without a thought, like some kind of primate obeying a deeply entrenched natural instinct. And then, with one hand holding the phone and the other tapping out letters – elbows, in this case, used for steering and balance – I hit reply and answer back.

So, get this for cheap irony: earlier this week, as I glided over a few lanes to head from the 10 Freeway east to the 405 Freeway north I hit a thick patch of traffic congestion, braked quickly, and then in my rear-view mirror saw the car behind me continue to speed in my direction.

The driver, I saw through the mirror, had not noticed that I’d stopped. She was looking at her phone.

“She’s going to get into an accident,” I thought to myself. “She’s going to kill herself – or, worse, me!”

(For some reason, it’s possible to have such wordy inner thoughts when there’s a car rapidly approaching yours.)

The impact on my car, when it finally happened – and it seemed to take about three hours for the car behind me to make contact – was sharp and loud and hard enough to cause my sunroof to pop open and the coffee cup in the centre console to fly into the air. There was the screaming sound of metal against metal, the crunch of plastic composite auto panels cracking into pieces, and of course the music of broken glass. I wasn’t hurt. But I was covered in coffee.

When something like this happens in Los Angeles – and, really, if you live here long enough, it’s going to happen to you – there’s a complicated protocol to follow, mostly a result of our prickly and litigious nature. As long as no ambulance is necessary – and, thankfully, both the driver of the car that hit me (the texter) and the driver of my car (me, for once blameless in this regard) – you wait for a police officer to arrive and give him or her all of the relevant details.

The texter’s car was utterly ruined. Mine was driveable as long as I didn’t hit a bump in the road. The impact had dislodged the exhaust system in the car, and the entire unit was hanging low enough to scrape along the ground on uneven roads.

When I finally got to the studio, where I’m directing an episode of my current series, the advice I received from my colleagues divided neatly into job-specific categories. The writers – always the cry babies – suggested I call a lawyer and begin legal proceedings against the other driver for emotional and psychological damage. The actors – hypochondriacs, every one of them – demanded that I go immediately to the hospital for a series of x-rays and neurological assessments. The members of the crew – the only useful and practical people on a film set at any time – told me to take a couple of aspirin and offered to help re-bolt the exhaust system.

Everyone, without exception, asked the same question about the driver who hit me: “She was texting, wasn’t she?” And they all asked it with the same disapproving expression, the identical mask of moral condemnation. So it was disconcerting, to say the least, to watch this expression change rapidly when I answered, “Yes, she was. But then, I do it all the time, too. It could easily have been me driving the other car.”

“Oh, me too,” they all said, as the expression of deep moral judgement switched instantly to a rueful half-smile and a shrug. “Me too. It’s like a compulsion.”

This little morality tale teaches us that we are immensely capable of both condemning something and admitting to it at the same time. The only real lesson from this story is, obviously: “Do Not Text and Drive.” But the lesson most of my friends and colleagues took from it was: “Do Not Text and Drive If You’re the Unfortunate Driver Behind Rob. If You’re Not, Well, It’s Impossible to Stop.”

For me – honestly – I’ve sworn off that kind of thing. I’ve kicked the habit. I haven’t so much as peeked at my phone while driving since the accident.

Mostly, I fear, because I haven’t driven since the accident. My car, of course, is in the shop. I’ve been in the backseat of a dozen taxis since then, happily texting away.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl