On the way to the beach my dumbass
Got in a car accident with a parked car last Saturday. I was trying to parallel park downhill in between two cars and when I was trying to back away from the van in front of me in order to get closer to the curb. One big problem was that the grade was pretty damn steep so the moment I took my foot off the break my car would accelerate quickly simply from the force of gravity.
Being the first time I parallel parked on a hill this steep before, I decide that as soon as I take my foot of the break, I’m gonna slam on the gas to create some distance between me and the van in front of me. I’m pretty sure it would have worked too if I didn’t forget to put the car in reverse. I straight slammed into the left rear bumper of the van in front of me causing some scrapes and cracks.
I leave a note on the windshield and some beach hippie told me that the owner of the van was “some big dude with a wife and two blond girls, probably the biggest dude on the entire beach”. I go to the beach and kill some time, trying to keep an eye out for this big dude and his family of blond girls. If you’ve ever been to the beach off Marine street you could see the street from the beach, so the entire time I was watching the van from the shore.
About two hours later I catch some lady with her family pile into the van, not some big dude that the beach hippie was talking about. I manage to chase her down and she hurriedly tells me she’ll give me a call as soon as she gets home since she lives 5 minutes away. I wonder why she’s such in a rush, but an overwhelming part of me secretly hopes that she’ll just pay off the whole thing herself since I’m thinking she lives in the upscale part of La Jolla.
Fast forward to this morning and I talk with her on the phone and agree to pay for the whole thing out of pocket to avoid reporting it to my insurance. She agrees to give me a number as soon as she gets a quote and overall that’s a big sigh of relief on my part since the whole time I’ve been wondering if my insurance rate was gonna be increased for the next few years.
My parents are in the PI since my Uncle John died last week and they decided to give her a call around 8PM for some peace of mind on the situation. They ask her about the current status of the quote and what she said caught me off guard slightly.
She told them she hasn’t had time to look into it since her mother is sick and she’s been dealing with other problems at home. As someone who just lost a family member, that struck a note with me.
To be honest up until that moment, all I saw was a lady who I owed some money to try to fix one of my screw ups. I failed to realize I was dealing with another human being. Car accidents are multifaceted situations. In many cases, two parties will be forced to have an interaction which, if the dice had been rolled differently that day, may have never happened at all. It’s also not a welcome interaction, and I can speak for myself by saying that it’s certainly not an interaction that welcomes the two parties to really see each other as real people with their own stories to tell.
I know I’ve caused a bit of a mess already in that lady’s life and I’ve only added to her list of worries. Looking back at the situation and without trying to fish for any “you did the right thing” validations, I’ll end by saying I’d hate to think how she would have handled if I dipped the hell out before she caught me.
