Some of you may be fans of “Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers,” the mechanics on NPR’s Car Talk. Click and Clack are the radio names for the hosts of Car Talk, Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Someone wrote Tom and Ray a letter sometime back.

Dear Tom and Ray:

Today I was involved in an accident. I was happily cruising along at the speed limit . . . in the right lane, when someone came up behind me. He was clearly very upset that I was doing just the speed limit, and he could not stand being unable to get around me because of a line of cars in the other lane. He began to follow me very closely.

Now, this situation activated some kind of psychological trigger for me, and I responded by tapping my brakes, causing him to swerve into the other lane (fortunately, there was a gap in the line of cars…