Thursday, January 7, 2010

I started the new year by totaling my car. 



No, that's not my car, that's just the car next to my car that makes me feel a little better every time I look at it. It reminds me how lucky I really am and how much worse it could have been. 

This is my car. 
Or, was, I should say. 



And, granted, it doesn't really look that bad, but let me adjust the angle a little bit for you. 



And, here's a close up:




Yeah.
The airbag deployed, but that's a boring picture. And the seat-belt compartment is broken too, but that's also a boring picture. And since I was coming home from the grocery store, I had a jar of pickles with me, and they broke too, making the entire inside of the car smell like pickles. Getting that smell out of the car should be enough to total it right there. I also noticed today while I was there that the windshield was literally centimeters from collapsing in on me. And while the damage isn't nearly that of the PT Cruiser next to it, I'm pretty sure that the damage done will exceed the $9000 mark when you start getting into the frame and steering column and all the other really expensive stuff that will need to be fixed.

What was that you asked? What happened? Oh, here, let me show you.

I was driving down this hill. Imagine me at the top. Around 7:20PM with slightly less than an inch of snow on the ground. Not going very fast at all. It was snowing after all.




And as I'm rounding the corner there I panic and press my brakes. They lock up, well, they do what ABS brakes do, which pretty much means they lock up, and I slide. I just slide. Nothing I could do, just slide. And unfortunately my car had a magnet for this:



A telephone pole. The one standing on the right is a brand new one they had up less than 24 hours later. The one broken and on the ground? That's mine. Yes, mine. Apparently there's a "You Break It, You Buy It" policy when it comes to telephone poles. And considering that I hit a telephone pole, and broke a telephone pole, I find it pretty hard to believe that there wouldn't be any frame damage at all, which brings me back to my guesstimate about the dollar value of damage. I'm sticking with totaled.

But, considering that I did indeed hit a telephone pole and was lucky enough to get up and walk away, I'd say that's not really the worst way to start off the year. I only hope now that my friends in the Cruiser were just as lucky.

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