So, I am sitting on Culver stopped behind a bunch of traffic at a light thinking to myself, “You know, our roadway system really moves a lot of people without a lot of accidents.”
Bam!
I jerk forward and my seatbelt stops me—the woman driving the white Jeep Cherokee behind me doesn’t see that traffic is stopped, or isn’t paying attention, and plows into me. Ugh!
We motion to each other to get over to the side of the road and I hop out with my first question being, “Are you alright?” and I smile at her. In the few fender-benders I’ve had, it is my experience that people come out angry and yelling because they are scared. By asking how the person is and smiling, I try to put whoever the other person is at ease. Seems to work, as the woman is a little shaky but otherwise becomes calm and smiles back. I would guess she’s in her late forties or early fifties with dark hair dyed so that it comes across very maroon in places. From her dress, she looks like a professional of some sort.
I wait for her answer, and she says yes, before I take a long look at my vehicle and hers. I inspect my undercarriage and muffler and then open my back door to make sure it still functions correctly. Then I ask her to open her hood and I take a long look at her engine compartment, radiator, and then get on the ground and look up at her undercarriage and bumper. I see no damage to either of our vehicles and nothing immediately seems wrong with either of us.
We discuss it a few more minutes and decide we got lucky, are both fine (relatively speaking), and our cars are not damaged enough to need to exchange insurance information, and we say our goodbyes. She seems relieved; by my calm demeanor and by our not exchanging insurance—I think she knows that, by hitting me from behind, she was going to be considered at fault and her insurance would have to pay everything.
I wish her a good luck on the rest of her morning.
It is now about two hours later and the adrenaline high and excitement of the accident is wearing off and I am finding I do have a headache and my neck has a very slight kink in it—nothing serious and nothing more than my arthritis routinely causes, but it is there. As I am coming up on the time when I need to get my truck serviced, I plan on also asking them to make a more careful inspection of that area of my vehicle, just in case.
What a way to start my Monday morning.
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