Dodging Bullets

This has been a very interesting week so far, and therefore I guess it has started off being an interesting year.

Yesterday, I was in a traffic accident. A car wreck, actually. The roads were slick, I was looking at street signs, and I completely missed that the light was red. I slammed on my brakes, but too late. A car was crossing the intersection, and I slid and banged right into it. She spun around a bit, but stopped without hitting anything. I pulled over, then signaled and turned into a parking lot that was on the corner of the two streets.

Now here's the interesting part: she drove off! I had parked my car and was walking towards her to see if she was okay, and she started driving. At first, I thought she was going around to enter the parking lot from the other side, but nope. Long gone. Why would anyone leave an accident, especially one that wasn't their fault?

I ended up calling the police (two hours before the car arrived) to file a report. I felt kinda weird doing so, but I certainly didn't want someone else filing it and claiming I had left the seen. Oddly, the cop never asked me about the light, and I wasn't about to tell him I had run it.

This was the really fascinating part to me. Immediately after the accident, my thoughts were full of dread: worrying about injuries, damage, tickets, costs, etc. It never occurred to me to pay attention to details about the other driver or her car. When the police officer questioned me about it, I was at a loss. How much detail do you retain from a few seconds of an encounter? How old was she? How many people were in the car? What was she wearing?

Having seen the ship and aircraft recognition silhouettes that they passed out during World War II, I always knew I'd be terrible at that. But little did I realize how relevant that could be to every day life. When I tried to describe the vehicle, I was stumped. It was an SUV. I thought it was a Jeep Cherokee. But have you ever seen four or five of those from the side? The differences between a Nissan, Lexus, Jeep, who-knows-what-else are not that significant. And then he asked me the year!

In the end, I know I should be grateful for numerous reasons. It could have been so much worse in so many ways. But even the act of the other driver leaving the scene was strangely beneficial to me, in that my insurance won't have to cover her damage.

Today, I had a similarly harrowing, close-call experience. My company had lay offs. This is by no means a unique story in today's economy, but I had not experienced it first-hand yet. What made it a particularly close call is the fact that one of my fellow writers was let go. There are (were) only three of us, and I was the most junior. Granted, he had switched to contract work, which I'm sure made the difference, but it was still unsettling.

After writing so much about the accident, I don't really feel up to commenting on the lay off thing anymore. I know it's tough times all over, and I am thankful that I still have a job I like.