The perfect word for this situation..

Danny drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, teeth clenched as he glanced left to see a middle-aged woman in a blazer furiously tapping at her own wheel, checking the time on her phone every few seconds. The line of cars hadn’t moved in minutes, and the noise was overwhelming—a relentless blare of honking, windows down as people leaned out to scream into the morning chaos.

 

To his right, a man in a wrinkled dress shirt with balding patches of grey hair was yelling out his window, trading eslurs with a driver two cars down. Danny rolled his eyes, noting how every other face looked nearly identical: impatient, scowling, and aging under the morning sun. There was a type here, he thought. The really impatient ones didn’t care about appearances. But the clean-cut, suited types, the ones who prided themselves on looking “classy” and “put-together”—they were glaring into the distance with restrained fury, probably wishing they could scream too but unwilling to risk wrinkling their pristine jackets or, heaven forbid, seem “unmannerly.”

He glanced at the dashboard clock and felt his chest tighten. He was going to be late for his first day at university. Not just any day—the day. He’d been up half the night, nervous but excited to start fresh, to leave behind this old routine. But here he was, stuck in the city’s morning grind. 

“Come on, move!” he muttered to himself, rapping the wheel harder. His phone buzzed on the passenger seat—an alarm he set, reminding him to be punctual. The irony nearly made him laugh, but he was too far gone for humour now. His leg bounced restlessly, and he had to resist the urge to honk along with the others.

The minutes ticked by, and finally, his patience cracked. He slammed the wheel. “Seriously? We can’t go one damn mile without a pileup?” He tried dialling up a traffic report on his phone, but even that seemed to lag, like the entire city had chosen this exact morning to conspire against him.

Danny took a deep breath, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. “Calm down, man. You’ll get there. It’s just…” But no matter how he spun it, the thought kept creeping back in—he was about to make his first impression, and his morning had already gone off the rails.