Never a Dull Moment

The place where I work sits adjacent to a diner on a major highway. There’s about ten feet of grass sloping downward toward the diner between our parking lot and theirs with 20-foot high metal lamp posts spaced evenly along this stretch of land. Employees for my company park in our lot facing the diner.

Today I spent a half-hour in my car, in the rain, eating my sandwich and reading about a dozen pages of Prelude to Foundation. I enjoy the solitude and peace and quiet from my normally very frenetic work environment. Ten minutes after I got back from lunch, however, I get a page to report to the receptionist’s desk. It appears a delivery box truck for the diner somehow struck one of the lamp posts dead-on, knocking it over onto the hood of my Impala, where it rolled over off the driver’s side and slammed into the car parked next to mine.

Our customer relations manager happened to be walking in the parking lot and heard the loud bang. She rushed to my car and spotted the driver of the truck running into the diner, leaving his vehicle idling loudly. She had the receptionist called 911 and the police arrived about ten minutes later after I and the co-worker who owned the car next to mine inspected the debris field.

The damage was a little worse than first glance, because the Impala is black and it was raining. But there is a foot-long dent in the front hood, red scratches from the post along the front of the hood, scratches and dents on the driver's side door post and mirror, and numerous hairline cracks running from the sides of my front windshield inward. My car was covered in shattered glass from the light post, which had come to rest like a pinball on the grass in front of the cars. Electrical wiring still connected to its shattered body and the concrete base served as a warning to us all to keep away from it.

The police came and took our information and eventually hunted down the dude in the truck. Don’t know his story – yet, but I should have the police report either by Friday or Monday. Then comes the long, tiresome business of getting the car fixed. There’s a body shop next to my company which does business with us and gives our employees breaks.

Oh! I have the whole thing caught on camera – cameras that monitor what goes on in our parking lots. My IT guy is going to burn a copy of it for me, so when I call truck driver’s insurance company, they know for certain they’ll be paying for repairs. It’s a crazy video – he must’ve hit the gas instead of the brake, because the truck accelerates over a curb, up five feet of incline grass, and smashes straight into the concrete base of the lamp.

Man, am I glad this day only comes about once every quadrennial!

NEVER A DULL MOMENT!!!