A very important disclaimer to start us off: If you were one of the many drivers who got stuck on a hill during the first snowstorm of the season Monday, turn away now. Go somewhere and have a glass of morning wine. Hit the couch and watch game shows all day. You deserve it, sport.

Also, I’m going to make fun of you somewhat.

It was unreal.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Just two inches of snow and the world outside appeared to be filled with people who have never seen cars before. Never heard of friction. Just did not believe at all in the laws of physics. Just two inches of snow and it was like watching dogs trying to figure out how a treadmill works.

I watched from the side of the road in the middle of a slight hill. And when I say “from the side of the road,” I mean a good 30 feet back from it. And even at that reasonably safe distance, I positioned myself in a spot where I could leap into a tree, squirrel-like, in a split second if I had to. And even with that backup plan, I was tempted to slap on a helmet, kidney pads and a cup just in case. Because I tell you, it wasn’t just that people were driving in crappy conditions. Some of them seemed determined to drive as badly as possible, as though this was the bumper car track at Old Orchard Beach instead of downtown traffic during the evening commute.

They drove up to intersections at 35 mph and then seemed earnestly shocked when the car kept gliding right through the red light.

They stomped gas pedals to the floor at the first sign of trouble, reasoning, apparently, that the faster they could make the tires spin, the better off they would be.

They tried to make last-second turns. They tried to pass if the fellow in front of them started getting into trouble. They yacked on cell phones and kept on trucking as though they weren’t driving on pretty much the same surface occupied by the Lewiston Maineiacs.

The streets turned into sheer chaos and yet five out of 10 drivers hung right on to carelessness and callousness, insisting that what worked yesterday should work just fine today.

It was madness. For 16 years, I’ve been writing stories and quoting bored cops as saying: “It happens every time we get the first snowstorm of the year. People just forget how to drive in snow and ice.”

I’ve just never seen it demonstrated so dramatically.

I checked with the weather people. It wasn’t lava or bees wax or extraterrestrial poo that fell out of the sky. It was snow. The same stuff that falls six months of the year. The very stuff giddy news people had been babbling about for a solid week.

Yet, look at that guy! He’s irritated because the harried woman in front of him is stuck halfway up a hill. He’s trying to pass and now he’s stuck too, in the oncoming lane. And now he’s getting enraged because the oncoming drivers are honking and yelling at him. There are suddenly three lanes of traffic on a two lane road and none of them are moving.

There were middle fingers and screaming horns. There were fistfights that turned ridiculous because it’s hard to spar in the middle of the road when you can’t keep your feet beneath you.

The smartest people I saw out there weren’t the truck guys with their four-wheel drive and tire chains. The smartest ones were those who skidded into parking lots and stayed there. Cranked up the heat, turned on the radio and stayed put until the true maniacs were off the streets. Then they crept home like adulterers, slowly but in one piece.

It’s always a hoot when a southern state gets walloped by snow. Up here, we hear about it and turn smug. “Ha ha!” the lifelong Mainer will bellow at his TV. “I’d like to see those morons trying to drive in that crap! They have no idea how it’s done!”

Then he will climb in his car, put the pedal to the metal, and careen out of control, bouncing off curbs and trash cans like a pinball and potentially wiping out unfortunate boneheads standing next to the street in protective gear.

I will grant you that the Monday mess came as a perfect storm of lousy timing. Two inches of snow fell within an hour. It happened at the very start of the commuter hour and just as the sun was departing.

I will grant you that most of the people out there were unfortunate souls traveling from work to home with an ice rink in between. They got stuck, got screamed at, and generally had a miserable time of it because of some meteorological conspiracy that couldn’t be avoided.

But that other segment, my God! They drive like idiots in good conditions and then ramp it up when the going gets rough. The entirety of their driving philosophy consists of attitude and velocity and cannot be adjusted under any conditions.

They really do forget how to drive in snow, just like Officer Friendly tells us. You have to wonder if these people also put their hands on glowing stove burners, unmindful of the lessons they learned the last time.

The best you can hope for, I suppose, is that everybody learns to adjust and gets used to driving in snow again. By the time spring comes around, we’ll probably be quite good at it.

In the meantime, I’d suggest slapping on protective equipment and learning to spring squirrel-like into trees. It’s not so hard, really, with a bit of practice.