2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Brad Stanhope)
Sometimes it takes more than one mistake to teach us a lesson. Sometimes it takes two mistakes in one week. It was my senior year of high school.
My dad had purchased a Volkswagen Thing – the Jeeplike vehicle that VW made for a few years – as a car for my older sisters and me to drive until we bought our own car. It was his car: We had to ask permission to drive it. He sometimes said no, deeming our desire ("I don't feel like taking the bus to school" or "I want to go to my friend's house because my other friends are also coming over") insufficient.
I was the youngest and by the time I was driving it, my sisters had either moved away, bought their own car or both. The Thing was largely mine (although I still often rode the bus to school). It was an interesting car.
The windows (except the windshield) were made of plastic. The doors came off. The windshield folded down.
You could take it offroad, except it was just a two-wheel drive vehicle without much power, so you could get stuck. So what? It had a winch on the front, so you could hook it to something and pull the car out. I drove that Yellow Thing frequently.
It had a top speed of about 60 mph, but once you went above about 40 mph, the engine noise was so loud (the car was like a can, it echoed) that you couldn't hear the radio. I drove the car to my job at McDonald's and one day, I stopped at the small supermarket near my home and picked up something (baseball cards? Diet soda? A Street and Smith's sports preview magazine?), then got in the car and backed up. I rolled back and .
.. BAM! Someone hit me from the right side.
Oh, no. My dad's car! The other driver was gracious. Their car had very little damage (how much damage can it cause if you hit a car that's as strong as an aluminum can?).
The Thing was dented, but not wrecked. It was my fault, since I backed in front of them, so we filed a police report for insurance purposes, knowing that only my car would need some work. Dad was surprisingly gracious.
That's why we have insurance, he said. Be careful next time, he said. I still felt pretty bad.
A week later, the police report was at his office. He worked near the police station and somehow it was sent to him. He told me to come by his office after school, pick up the report and take it to the insurance company, since they would be paying for the repair.
(Imagine a world without email or even fax machines. I had to physically take the report to their office!) I stopped by, picked up the report, backed out of his small parking lot, when ..
. BAM! Someone hit me from the right side. What happened? Was this deja vu? How could this happen again? That other driver must have been driving too fast! I didn't even see him! Well, maybe he was driving too fast, but three things worked against me: 1.
The other driver knew my dad. 2. He was an insurance agent.
3. His father was the mayor. Oh, no.
This time, the Thing was smashed. The entire right side was ruined. I didn't understand how the same thing happened twice.
This time (I found out a few days later), the car was totaled. I'd wrecked the car my dad bought for us to drive. Worse yet, I didn't have a car to drive and both accidents were my fault.
I'd ruined everything. As I thought more about it, I realized what happened. Sometime over the year-plus that I'd been driving, I'd developed a bad habit: When I backed up, I looked over my left shoulder and then looked in my rear-view mirror.
I never looked to the right! Never . I saw what was on the left side and behind me, but that's all. In retrospect, it's amazing that I hadn't gotten in other wrecks.
I was blind to any car coming from the right side. It's a life lesson: Sometimes, things happen that are not our fault. Sometimes, they're someone else's fault, sometimes, they're no one's fault.
And sometimes our bad habits – of which we may not even be aware – cause all kinds of problems. But I haven't backed in front of the insurance-selling son of the mayor again. Lesson learned.
Reach Brad Stanhope at [email protected] ..
