The Assident

My friend Big'n'Tall likes to play with words. He likes to say "apposa" instead of "supposed to", and he calls pickles "piggles". Anything remotely resembling a bucket or a basket is a "busket". He also calls an accident an "assident". This seems like a pretty accurate interpretation to me.

Today, I got in an assident.


I hate getting into traffic collisions. I'm sure no one particularly enjoys them, but any time it happens, no matter what the circumstances, I get that feeling that I'm being sucked into another dimension via a black hole in the pit of my stomach. It's decidedly unpleasant.

Whenever my students tell me a story in which they are ultimately guilty of something stupid or irresponsible, they always start it with the phrase, "See, what had happened was..."

Between the copper, the insurance agent, and my mother, I've already explained this more times than I care to, so here's a little diagram to illustrate. Essentially, I was trying to get home, turned in front of a bus who was stopped behind a Hummer who was trying to turn behind me, and should have waited two more seconds before so doing. For my male readers, I have put everything in military terminology to help you understand.



(Note: References to the Hummer as the "Enemy" are purely due to the fact that I think everyone who drives a Hummer hates nature and ergo is no friend of mine. This is not at all indicative of the driver's behavior before, during, or after the Incident, which was exemplary.)

I actually T-boned the Bogie. My mother thought I misspoke -- in her head, it seemed like the Bogie T-boned me -- but she underestimated the Bogie's velocity, which was a significant factor. By the time I saw the car at all, I was looking through its back window. The force of the impact pushed the Bogie toward the curb, and the driver then over-corrected and slammed into the passenger's side of the Hummer.

Technically, the assident was my fault, which I suppose makes me the ass who caused the dent. I expect, based purely on past experience, that when I'm in an assident, whether I was the ass or not, the other driver is going to bitch me out. It's kind of how people do things around here. I got out of my car fully expecting to get it from the driver of the Bogie, who turned out to be a little old woman on her way to work at the local home for down-and-out teenage moms. The driver of the other car was a college student who was approximately thirty-seven feet from her home when the Bogie slammed into her. Once we confirmed that nobody was bleeding, neither of them seemed upset at all. A bit shakey, perhaps, but nowhere near slapping me or pulling my hair. In fact, I didn't get so much as a dirty look from either of them.

How is this possible? Well, here's what I figure:

I made a left turn without ensuring that the coast was clear and so was guilty of the moving violation that caused the Incident.

However:

The driver of the Bogie was exceeding the speed limit by approximately 20 mph, which is naughty in any case, but she was also doing it while passing a school bus on the right. That's not exactly a crime, but it's criminally stupid, especially considering how much traffic there was.

Additionally, it turned out that the teenage driver didn't have her license! Another big no-no.

When the cop arrived to write the report, we were all hanging around chatting in pretty good spirits. There was no finger-pointing, just calm explanations of what happened. He was so flabbergasted that instead of writing tickets for all of us, he wrote no tickets at all. He just looked at our cars, filled out the report, and took off.

Ultimately, I came up with a new theory of traffic collisions, which is thus: When guilt is equally distributed among all parties and all parties are of such a moral fiber that they accept responsibility for their own guilt, a altercation may be easily avoided by shrugging and saying "Shit happens".