My Car Incident

Here is a story on myself. If you look back over the last two years of posting you’ll see that there aren’t many of these. It’s not because I don’t do stupid things, because I make dumb mistakes all the time, it’s that when I try to type them out they don’t seem quite as funny as Jay’s problems with Charlie or Cade’s thought process. This incident actually occurred the day before we left on vacation and I would’ve blogged about it then, but we were busy getting ready to leave. Then I didn’t get around to doing it, which is just as well because the story got funnier (or more irritating, depending on how you look at it) over the weekend. Yes, this is one of those stupid mistakes that I will be paying for for a very long time – not only in terms of money but also by comments from Jay. In fact Jay is quite busy today running around taking care of several little problems. So many in fact that he had to make himself a list….

The initial incident happened on July 9th. That day I had to cover our Cassville office. It’s what FCS calls a “contact point” which is code for hole in the wall. It’s only open 3 hours on Tuesdays and 3 hours on Thursdays. There is no computer there. The Loan Officer who normally covers the office has a laptop. Since I don’t have a laptop I get to sit there for 3 hours reading a book. Really I don’t mind, except the day before a woman leaves for a 10 day vacation she really doesn’t need to sit for three hours with nothing to do except for thinking about all the stuff she needs to be doing at home. When my time was finally up that day and I rushed out to my car I remembered I needed gas. Luckily there was a gas station not too far from the office on the right side of the road. I could quickly pull over, get the gas, and be back on the road in a matter of minutes. There was a flaw in my plan though because I had to pull out onto a side street before I could make a right back on to the highway. When I tried to pull onto the side street I couldn’t because there were two cars on the street all trying to turn left onto a highway. Since I had too many things to do I didn’t have time to wait on 2 jakelegs trying to make left turns. I decided to take a right on the side street and wind around until I could get a clear shot back to the highway.

A couple of driveways later I saw this one that looked perfect. I could go into the back of this parking lot and exit the front right on the highway. This is where my memory gets a little fuzzy….I don’t think I was driving all that fast and I honestly can’t remember what happened or why I seemed to not be using my brains at all that day….As I was heading to the highway I didn’t realize that the entrance on this parking lot had a major dip to it. It was so steep it was like my car didn’t even dip down it just went straight into the other side of the dip. I hit it hard enough that I came to a sudden stop, my seatbelt locked up, and I heard that horrifying noise of plastic being scratched. Then I made my next bad decision of the day…Looking back I should’ve tried backing the car up but that option didn’t even start to enter my mind. Instead I hit the gas and heard more of the awful sounds of plastic and probably some metal scraping against concrete. It seriously could’ve been a scene straight from National Lampoon’s Vacation.

So after stopping to make sure that my front end didn’t come off, almost getting hit by a van and stopping again to shut my gas cap that I had forgotten to do earlier I made it home and got the car parked. I didn’t drive it again until the day after we got home, 11 days later.

As I pulled into work on the 21st my car scraped on the bottom in the parking lot. That has never happened before so that caused warning bell #1 to start ringing in my head. When I left work that day I noticed my two front tires were low – warning bell #2 started going off. Jay kept saying that the scraping was a piece of plastic and the tires were low because the car had sat for almost two weeks. Finally after two weeks of embarrassing noises while pulling into parking lots and two more low front tires Jay took the car to the tire shop Saturday morning. I had a nail in one tire and a screw in the other. We’re assuming that happened at the time of the incident in Cassville. Then while the car was jacked up Jay noticed that what he thought was ok (because the sides matched) was in fact not ok. I had bent the metal things holding up my radiator. Both sides were damaged identically….again were assuming it occurred during the incident.

Then to top off that act of stupidity I drove past a sign Friday night that said “We do vehicle inspections here” and it dawned on me that my tags expired in June. I had never renewed my tags. I had drove all over SW Missouri for the last month with expired tags. I met my mom and grandpa in town for lunch on Saturday and the whole time I was afraid I was either going to get a ticket or my radiator was going to fall off. Either one would’ve been equally embarrassing not to mention extremely inconvenient.

So back to today’s list – Jay was going to go get my tags and call the dealership to see about repairing my car. He also had to get dog food and take Cade’s calf, Buttons, to the vet. Somehow on Saturday Buttons pulled a off one of his horns. I don’t know that I ever mentioned Buttons on the blog – but he’s a whole other post for another time. We’ll have to decide if we are going to dehorn him or hope that it grows back. Yes, I’m sitting here at work seeing $$$$ signs flash before my eyes. I’m going to be paying for this in many ways for a very long time…But at least the flashing $$$$ signs are blocking the view of the large piece of plastic hanging out under my car…