I am tooling down Highway Fifty
Enjoying my time all alone.
I hate that stupid ringing,
It’s my wife on the dern car phone.

The way that these nuts are driving
She knows it’s dumb to converse.
While I was turning the thing on,
I just missed hitting a hearse.

She thinks that just ’cause I’m eighty,
I’m no longer properly skilled.
Her long-distance backseat driving
Is going to get one of us killed.

No way that I can survive
Without her instant support.
She’s constantly calling my car phone
To relay each traffic report.

She tells me, “Watch out, it is raining,”
Like maybe I just didn’t know.
She tells me where traffic is heavy
And always which way I should go.

Like now she just called to warn me,
“It’s better to come home the long way.
On TV they said that on Fifty,
Some fool is traveling the wrong way.”

There’s more than one stupid driver,
It shows how wrong she can be.
There’re lots of nuts going the wrong way
And they’re shouting and honking at me!

Everybody loves a Back Seat Driver. My wife doesn’t think that I can survive a trip without having her along to tell me when the light changes. Although, I have been able to make it to town a few times on my own. In one of the current TV commercials, a man is grocery shopping for his wife and he calls his wife on his cell phone to get her advice on each and every purchase. Finally he gets to the check-out counter and is surprised when she hangs up on him because he called to ask her, “Paper or plastic?”

Some people seem to like to be controlled. The 80-year-old man in this poem needed help but, like all of us husbands, he just didn’t realize it.