Stay yourself, San Francisco. Always stay yourself.
Sure, crime rates, drug abuse and homelessness are sky-high in the Bay Area metropolis. But a start-up founder has discovered a problem that really necessitated a social media meltdown:
An ambulance parked in the bike lane.
According to KTVU-TV, the video was originally posted on the account of @drivingmzstacey, the social media handle of Stacey Randecker.
In the video, which is a little under two minutes long, Randecker is seen having a hissy fit over the San Francisco Fire Department ambulance parked in a marked lane for bicycles.
“Here’s an ambulance in the bike lane. There is a business they can park in! They can block the car lane, they can block the nonexistent motorcycle park lane!” Randecker shouted in the viral video.
“I am not even half a mile from home on a rainy day. What the f***?! What the f***!?”
Then, with no trace of irony, she told the driver of an ambulance — a vehicle designed to park in an optimal location to save lives and stuff like that — that she was “killing” bike riders.
“Get out of the bike lane!” the woman exclaimed. “You’re killing us. Get out of the bike lane.”
“Unbelievable! They’re killing us! They’re killing us!” she continued.
The ambulance would eventually move to the other side of the road.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic and profane language that some viewers will find offensive.
San Francisco bicycle rider has a hysterical episode over an ambulance in a bike lane. There are many such cases. pic.twitter.com/RCOOKlutK1
— Catch Up (@CatchUpNetwork) December 30, 2022
According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, the incident happened outside a Room & Board furnishing store on 7th Street in San Francisco a little before noon on Thursday.
Randecker told the British-based tabloid that while she sounded “crazy,” there were extenuating circumstances.
“I really admit I had lost it,” the 51-year-old startup founder said. “But I don’t think people understand what it’s like. You’re on a bike, in the rain, and the one path that you have is blocked over and over again in such a short amount of time.”
She also said she couldn’t have just ridden around it, considering white “traffic armadillos” — raised bumps that protect bikers from motorists — would have forced her to walk.
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Randecker said that when she posted the video, she “didn’t even think about it. I got to the coffee shop where I was headed, I was still p***ed, and I just posted it, I didn’t even listen to it.”
The ambulance, Randecker said, was the fifth vehicle in a half-mile she’d seen blocking the bike lane. She claimed the driver of the ambulance was on her cellphone at the time of the confrontation.
“If it had seemed like she was stressed or whatever, I wouldn’t have posted it, I would have calmed down, but she was just texting, contrary to what the fire department is saying,” Randecker said.
Yeah, see, that’s the issue: Randecker’s version of the meltdown has been contradicted by the San Francisco Fire Department.
“Thank you for sharing this. The crews did not say they ‘were on a break’, they were finishing a medical emergency with a patient care document from a call at that location which is why they moved to the other side of the street rather than engage with you,” the SFFD’s media team said in a tweet, before ending it in the ultimate Bay Area passive-aggressive sorry-not-sorry manner: “Have a safe day.”
Thank you for sharing this. The crews did not say they “were on a break”, they were finishing a medical emergency with a patient care document from a call at that location which is why they moved to the other side of the street rather than engage with you. Have a safe day. https://t.co/3eI8mYU7Wk
— SAN FRANCISCO FIRE DEPARTMENT MEDIA (@SFFDPIO) December 29, 2022
Look, one understands that most of us have 1) really bad days and 2) social media accounts and that 3) we sometimes use the latter to document the former in ways that don’t necessarily work out in our favor, particularly when the results get shared widely.
In such cases, the incident is worth touching on because it highlights a particular phenomenon — in this case, the terminally misplaced priorities of Bay Area residents — but a not insignificant amount of grace ought to be extended to someone whose bad day is made worse by a case of the overshares.
In this case, however, Randecker seems determined to double down on her assertion that this meltdown was entirely called for because she was so sure the EMT didn’t have good reason to be in the bike lane.
After all, as the Daily Mail noted, she said “the furnishing store had just opened and most of the office buildings were empty due to the holidays and the store’s parking lot was 20 feet away from where the vehicle was parked.”
“If you work for the city and there’s an active emergency, good God, no I wouldn’t have said anything, are you kidding me? But to be texting on your phone and you work for our city and it’s not urgent – if it’s urgent, you got to do what you got to do, but it was definitely not urgent,” she said.
Oh, well, in that case, clearly Randecker knows better than a trained EMT. She clearly knows what was being typed into that phone. And clearly, she still thinks that no matter how “crazy” she sounds, she was entirely entitled to tell the ambulance to move. There was no emergency! Stacey Randecker has coffee shops to go to on that bike of hers and if you’re in her way, you’re “killing” her.
If and when Stacey Randecker needs an ambulance — and heaven forfend that’s anytime soon — one hopes it isn’t forced to park down the road due to an irate, entitled bicyclist like herself.
Given San Francisco’s skewed value system, that very well may be the lesson everyone ends up taking away from all of this.
