| | I spend most saturdays doing my job, cleaning and preparing my church for sunday services. Depending on how slow or fast I'm working and what sort of challenges pop up I occasionally end up working past midnight. For the last month, in fact, I've usually finished between 12:00 and 2 am. But tonight I turn(ed) 20, and I guess that made me a little more motivated than ususal, because I finished the tasks that have taken up to 10 hours (on reaaly really bad days) in less than half that time and by about 10:25 I was in my car bumping some old school Public Enemy and shifting to reverse.
Now in the parking lot behind the church you have to park between these deadly little stuccoed (the better to grip your paint job, my dear) pillars that have cost many a poor parking person dearly, and today it seems my luck was up. As I excitedly accelerated out of my space, turning in the direction that I knew held a blue dumpster and a thin pole that had probably dented hundreds of cars. I peered through my fogged back window as I turned, trying to see the pole. Apparently, I hadn't already cleared the first obstacle, the column. With a wrenching shudder and a hideous thunk I scraped free of its clutches. I mentally crossed my fingers and continued backing up, determined to ignore it and examine the damage when I got home. As I drove forward, still in denial, an unnerving scraping sound brought me to my senses.
I got out and walked around the front, and found my whole front end on the ground! The bumper and grill were draggin from the left edge of my car, and completely flush with the ground on the right. My left headlight and both blinkers were dangling from their electrical cables. After taking stock of the damage and consulting with home base (the progenitors) I went scouting for some sort of thin strong cables and came up with a roll of electrical wire.
As I was figuring out how to best wire the bumper back onto my car two moderately inebriated figures approached fresh from the pub to check out the damage. After they learned that I had been leaving church, rather than than having drunkenly slushed my bumper off, I "endured" the most gentile and good natured teasing I've ever heard. After I mentioned that ironically, I'd smashed up my car on my birthday hour the girl gave me a great big hug which made me feel a little better (from stunned and apathetic to moderately fuzzy) and then the guy took a look at the blinker that didn't want to fit back in. He decided it needed tape to hold in place, which I'd already decided, and they set off back to the pub in hope that someone there would probably have a roll of duct tape in their pickup or something.
I wired it up.
Knowing that mildly inebriated people -although well intentioned- may not be entirely reliable, I then set out to find my own tape. (To deviate mildy from chronology, I think I may have tried to open the hood before I went to tape up the lights.) After I finished using up my 2nd roll of mostly used duct tape and resorted to packaging tape, a familiar minivan rolled up and a friend and co-worker rolled his window down and his eyes up. For the next hour we trouble-shot and problem solved and once we had everything wired and taped down tight more or less in their proper locations we picked up Dell Taco and just chilled for a while.
I don't look forward to paying for a replacement bumper, or installing it, but I'm actually kind of glad I had such a memorable evening. Tonight I was forced to stop coasting through life and think on my feet, to experience every moment fully in the now. There was no opportunity for disconnect, the only way is to roll with things, accept them, deal with it, move on. The damage is unfortunate, what it taught me about cars and automotive design, curious. What I remember most happily is the simple interactions I had with kind-hearted people tonight.
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| | Posted 11/18/2007 2:33 AM - 46 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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