I was driving along a four-lane highway during a particularly busy time. On the route home and nearing the home stretch (only a few hours left) and things were flowing smoothly.

Behind me in the left lane was a transport giving some space and up ahead in the right lane were two other transports. There were a few cars ahead of me in the left lane as well.

Everybody is being conscientious and aware… which is another way of saying nobody was being an idiot.

Then it happened.

A car came zooming up behind me on the right hand lane. With cars in front of me in both lanes, there was really nowhere for this person to go. The person ends up in my blind spot.

I have my wife in the passenger seat and the kids in the back.

There some slowdown ahead and I ease on the gas when all of a sudden, I hear the truck behind me blaring his horn.

Looking into my rear view mirror, I see him backing off pretty quickly.

It was then I realize the person beside me was coming into my lane in an effort to push me off the road.

I can’t speed up because there’s a car directly in front and the lives of my family are too valuable for me to push back or play games. I hit my brakes while honking bloody murder at the person coming in.

My first feeling of gratitude is to the driver behind me who not only warned he was cutting in, but also backed up enough for me to brake without causing a pileup.

Needless to say, the person managed to get ahead of me (with a family in the car as well), but wasn’t going anywhere. Congratulations, you got nowhere.

But then, as you may recall, there were two trucks up ahead in the right lane. One of them slowed down and the other hit his turn signal to jump over lanes.

I smiled.

I knew exactly what was going to happen.

The trucker who slowed down, did it enough to keep his pace just ahead of the car ahead of me. The other trucker edged into the left lane, allowing the cars to pass in a hurry while cutting off the dangerous culprit.

I eased up on the gas and told my wife, “Watch this.”

Both trucks slowed right down to well below highway speeds. They saw what happened and decided to teach a little lesson.

I could see the frustration on the driver of the car in front of me. He was yelling obscenities and frantically waving his arms because he had nowhere to go except the ditch.

It was one of the rare moments where I didn’t mind going slow and I took it all in to enjoy the show. My face hurt from smiling.

This went on for a while before the highway opened up to six lanes and the car sped off again.

I stuck my arm out the window, honked my horn a few times and gave the thumbs up to the truck drivers around me. They honked back.

With all the talk of automation and self-driving trucks, it’s moments like this I’m going to miss.

I’ll miss asking truck drivers for best times to travel to certain cities, which to take and which to avoid.

I’m also going to miss all the businesses that depend on long distance drivers along the highway.

My teenage self will miss my friend’s dad who used to bring me back Pepsi One whenever he made runs in the US because we couldn’t get it in Canada.

My childhood self will miss pumping my arm up and down in the window to get a trucker to honk his horn (something I taught my son recently and I couldn’t tell if he or the driver got a bigger kick out of it).

We can’t stop the technological disruption, and it’s certainly not there yet (good luck having a computer traverse the icy roads of Canada’s highways with weather that changes every minute), but there’s a lot of humanity that will be stripped away.

And that’s what we should never forget.