This past September I was in a car accident. It wasn’t too bad, and I was going to blog about it then, but there was a bunch of other kind of bummed out stuff going on.
The only reason I’m relaying this story to you now is because my little brother heard the story for the first time over the weekend, and he asked, nay, INSISTED that I blog about it because my blog content of late had become, “sub-par” for his tastes.
Anyway, first I ‘ll set the scene, I was in a small town in Baltimore and I was driving towards an intersection with a stoplight. I was a few cars back from the light, and to my right were some parking spots that were perpendicular to my car.
I was sitting in the car, minding my own business* when one of the cars parked on my right started backing up. This proved to be bad news for me, as my car was directly in the path of the car backing up. I honked my horn to no avail. The golden Volvo backed directly into my car.
The Volvo pulled back into its space, and I pulled into the space next to it. The woman got out of the car and was immediately apologetic.
“Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry! Is there any damage?”
I wasn’t sure, so I ventured around to the passenger side of the car to check. On my way around, I noticed that her tank of a Volvo had sustained no damage. My entire door had been collapsed into itself.
“Oh, look at your door! I’m so sorry! I should probably give you my insurance information.”
I looked at the door and shrugged, “Nah, don’t worry about it.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll just bang the dent out from the inside,” I started to wonder how long it would take me to get the interior panelling off. Probably 15 minutes.
“But it’s huge. You’ll have to get that fixed.”
“Probably not. The car’s a piece of shit, and it’s not like you hit the engine, so everything is still running. It’s just a door.”
At that very moment, there was a “fwoop-THUNK” sound of metal behind me. We both turned to look at the dent, and it was gone.
I turned back around to face her, “See, no problem.”
She looked at where the dent used to be incredulously, “But, I guess I should still pay to have that fixed.”
“Yeah, to be honest, my insurance company would want me to get that fixed, and I have a $500 deductible, so your insurance would go up, and I would be out of some money. Nobody wins. Just try not to hit me when I pull out this time.”
“Ha ha! Okay. I’m really sorry!”
“It’s alright. That’s why I buy used cars.”
In the end she gave me her contact and insurance information anyway. I told her I would call the insurance if the steering alignment went out, or if I had some problems with the tires. She thanked me for understanding, and pulled away a few moments later.
All the evidence that remained of the accident was a baseball sized ding in the door, and the meatball tray sized dent was fading from our memories.
*Does it drive anyone else crazy when people say this? Of course you were minding your own business. Were you going to start your story by saying, “I was in my car, orchestrating a criminal scheme to become a cocaine kingpin”?
