in the middle of your car, does it make a sound? Josh can confirm that it most certainly does. If only I had a photo . . . :side eyes Josh:
He’s excused from failing to capture photographic proof of the craziest thing to happen this week as he was a bit shook up by the entire event. Josh was driving home from the gym and waiting at a stoplight. When it turned green, he turned left, saw a guy on the sidewalk with his hands up and next thing he knew, there was a bang and a crunch and a big tree fell across the entire hood and front of his car.
How does that happen? Someone was doing tree cutting on a major road and didn’t think to close off the lanes that would be affected if a branch (or in fact, an entire trunk) were to fall after it was cut. That, my friends, is exactly what I mean when I say NQR. I don’t know how someone doesn’t think to assess the 2nd and 3rd order effects of an action, but we see it often.
Josh was furious as these things usually end up going in circles and are exercises in frustration. Since our car was imported from the US we can’t get full coverage insurance (don’t ask. It’s a long story involving salvage vehicles and the shady resale market here) on it so none of the damage would be covered by our insurance.
When there are property damage issues here or other grievances such as would show up in Judge Judy’s court, it doesn’t work the way we would expect it to. There’s no mechanism for suing someone. I mean, there might be, but I’ve heard it costs more to file a case than most could afford and is probably a waste of money, effort, and energy. If you pursue it with management of a company you suspect (or find out) that it’s actually the minimum wage worker who will be paying the price, which isn’t something you want on your conscience. Often it ends with a “sorry” and there is nothing to be done but move on and take care of it yourself.
Anyway, Josh called me while waiting for the police to come and we prayed that he would handle it peacefully and not be angry, since it’s just a car. Thank God he wasn’t a few seconds later or it could have hit his windshield and hurt him! To ease his stress I suggested that maybe the mechanic could pop out the dent in the hood and we could drive it all scratched up and he laughed at me and said, “the car is crushed. I don’t even know if it’s mechanically sound anymore” (it is, thankfully).
Now for the good news. The person cutting down the trees works for a VIP, who agreed to take care of the damage. The police saw the scene, the tree (and was shocked by the amount of damage), and wrote the police report: Car damaged on hood, bumper, front, right and left sides. XXX has agreed to pay for the damage. Amazing.
A minion took Josh’s car directly from the police station to the mechanic where we assume they will have much difficulty sourcing body parts for a Subaru Forrester, but that’s on them. The police told Josh that he could come back to them if there were any issues and commented how lucky he was that the person was accepting responsibility for the damage without any pushback. (Yes, we know!)
So we’re down to 1 car these days, and may be for many days, but since Josh works from home and I ride my bike to school that’s not exactly a hardship. #thanksCovid
In other news . . .
Camille at school! This is in her library/technology class where they are learning about coding and creating podcasts this week. (Photo snagged from Instagram)
First full day of school with her entire class (minus the ones that are choosing remote learning for now). Follow those dots!