A woman crashed into me at full speed on Friday at 12:12 in the afternoon just two blocks from my home. She lives in this neighborhood and seems like a perfectly nice person. Married. Three grown children. Nice house. Nice car. But…………perhaps distracted at the wrong moment. I’m not sure yet, although when I get my car back, I’m eager to see if one of its cameras recorded the incident. This is what the interior of my car looked like shortly after I was t-boned.
Now, this isn’t the first time a nice lady from Palo Alto has crashed into my car. I wrote about an incident like this from years ago, although that accident was vastly gentler than this one. I guess I need to start avoiding nice women who live in my town, because they’ve caused me nothing but trouble. In fact, as I think of it, of the five or six times a vehicle of mine has ever been hit, the driver has been a female 100% of the time. Sheesh, honestly, it didn’t occur to me until just now One. Hundred. Percent.
In any case, I did not act calm as with the last incident. The prior time I got crashed into by a lady, I was incredibly calm, mellow, and peaceful. I would have done my mother proud. This time, I flipped out, even though I was driving alone and was utterly uninjured. Partly because of the shock; partly because I was going to miss doing my show; and partly because my lovely new car was ruined. So let’s just say I engaged in a frank exchange of ideas.
I also want to emphasize that I’ve never had something so unexpected happen to me in my life. It was absolutely instantaneous, almost like being shot. I had no time to think or react, until such time as I exited my vehicle and illustrated my ability to articulate my feelings.
On top of all this, even though the Tesla was only cosmetically damaged, the car is designed to utterly shut itself down in an accident, and even three days later when I look at my Tesla app, it shows the car sitting in the middle of an intersection (which is where it was at the last moment it was still alive).
So the car sat there, blocking traffic, which itself made for an interesting social study. I would say that, of the couple hundred cars navigated around the accident:
- Zero people were rude;
- About 15% of them asked, out their window, if anyone was hurt or needed help;
- Most of the cars were, in fact Teslas.
Indeed, before the accident, I had dropped my son off at Tesla headquarters at, driving my Tesla, I was plowed into by a woman driving another Tesla. I guess the only thing that could have made it more Palo Alto is if we were both heading to an Elon Musk rally.
When I tweeted out an apology to my tastylive viewers that I missed my show due to being hit, about a gazillion people replied with almost the same thing, word for word: “I hope you are OK.” It was touching, but goodness, people aren’t very creative in expressing themselves. When I followed up with a tweet that said no one was hurt at all, almost every single person in turn wrote, word for word, “I’m glad you are OK.” Is the entire world made of nothing but bots?
To the driver’s credit, she took full responsibility for the accident (which, umm, was the truth) and her insurance is going to cover everything. Still, it’s a huge pain in the ass. We are a one car family now, and we’re doing a long road trip a couple of Fridays from now which is going to require either our car back or, if it’s not repaired, the rental of a vehicle. Needless to say, I’ve already had to engage in all kinds of phone calls, coordination, and paperwork. It sucks. I can almost always see a silver lining in any situation, but not this time.
The biggest loss of all, for me, is trust. I have driven since 1983, and I’ve generally a careful driver. I’ve never, in more than 40 years, been hit like this, and it’s given me a bit of PTSD now when I’m driving, because I cannot emphasize this enough, there wasn’t a MILLISECOND of warning.
And the biggest loss of all is that I’ve told myself I’m not doing to have my dogs in the car with me anymore, since it’s clear to me now there is a risk to them that I simply didn’t respect. If the woman had hurt one of my dogs, I would have strangled her to death with my pants belt. They have driven with me for years, and they love it, so now one of Palo Alto’s feckless females has changed their lives, and they don’t even comprehend it.
I’m glad my three dogs aren’t aware of this theft from their lives, because it would make them really sad. I feel like something has been taken away from me, and them, that I can never get back, all because someone wasn’t paying fucking attention.
