The Little Handbook for Navigationally Challenged Cidiots

A comedic approach to dangerous highway and byway scenarios, The Little Handbook for Navigationally Challenged Cidiots grabs the attention of every driver who has had experiences with road idiots. Better known as a “cidiot,” this person is defined as “a navigationally deficient person having common driving knowledge in the lowest degree, appearing to be incapable of guarding against and usually the culprit of common road, street, highway, freeway and expressway dangers, and nearly aloof as to how to properly navigate on the roadways.” Attaching a name to a situation, Head’s quick read sheds a humorous yet serious light into almost every conceivable traffic bumble.

D.C. Head has collaborated with G. and Ken Head to produce a book that, as they say, “is intended for everyone from all walks of life, from every corner of the world, of the legal driving age and even for those who don’t drive.” Readers are encouraged to take the quiz at the back of the book to see “where they fall on the cidiots chart” before delving into D.C.’s second book, which offers a fresh look at crazed roadway circumstances. By providing a dictionary of terms for those who would otherwise be labeled with the usual string of expletives, D.C. and her troupe have neatly compiled and categorized cidiots according to their connected bizarre traffic violations. Categories include topics such as merging, tailgating, lane crossing, and speed, to name a few, but with clever chapter headings.

Listed under a Table of Contents (with “Complaints” crossed out and replaced with “Contents”), D.C. et al include eye-catching cidiot titles. Examples include Um…What’s Merge?, Is Tailgating Rude?, Lanes: The Broken White Lines, and Speed: Ah, the Open Road. And while the titles may produce a chuckle or two, it only gets better with the cidiot terminology that includes phrases like The Psycho Cyclist, Cling-On, The Ass Wipe, and Truck Romance—again just to name a few. The last chapter is titled Driving Communication Specialists and is geared toward what cidiots are actually doing in their cars—and thus, the reason why they’re creating traffic issues. A few included in the colorful lineup are The Euphorian Drexter, The Decision Maker, and The Not-So Multi-Tasker.

Although The Little Handbook for Navigationally Challenged Cidiots is a rib-tickler from beginning to end, kudos to the authors for creating a handbook that “delivers the harsh truth about some of the common careless practices many people engage in while driving,” and for “conveying a serious message to the public to analyze themselves and others who operate motor vehicles.”