The main thing we car guys need to remember about trucks is "Let the Wookie win."
Smart or dumb, experienced or green, in good form or tired or wired or feeling the dispatcher's hot breath on the back of his neck, doing the right thing or screwing up (happens to the best of us...) it doesn't really matter in the moment. They all have one thing in common: enough momentum to make the undertaker use a lot of makeup to cover up the Peterbilt logo embossed in my back.
Getting into that situation because of an attempt to show courtesy to a merging truck definitely would have been more than my minimum daily requirement of irony.
As for how it might've been handled differently: that's a tough one. I like to think that, having changed to the left lane with big fast traffic coming up on the right, I'd have had the wit and the brakes to stay there and take my medicine.
If you *do* change lanes again, back to the right with the careening dump truck a few seconds closer than before, it has to be done with the most vigorous acceleration. If traffic ahead doesn't allow that ("I moved right again, to pbutt him on the right, AND BRAKED" emphasis mine) you risk becoming the baloney in a dump-truck sandwich. And since he was going straight in his own lane and you were maneuvering, it could argue that the duty to see and avoid was on you at that point...
I wonder why the truck ahead of you went for the left lane. I guess he was committed to the merge before he fully appreciated the dump truck driver's Human Cannonball act. Then he decided the best way to avoid participating in that was to keep going left, treating your speed and position as a free variable (if in fact he saw you at all).
Sounds like there was enough fault for everybody to have a portion. (BTDT...)
Fortunately Rule #1 of driving was obeyed ("Don't hit nothin'"); and luck, and the dump truck driver's willingness to take the shoulder, gave everybody a free pbutt on Rule #2 ("Don't let nobody hit you") so all you broke was the relatively less important Rule #3 ("Don't scare nobody.") Go thou and sin no more, at least not in that way.
Cheers, --Joe
