Three Car Pileup

Three Car Pile-up

I drive the speed limit. I didn’t always. I used to drive a Mazda RX-7. My mom sold it to me after she had driven it a few years. I talked my wife into buying it. She was dubious until we pulled up and she remembered what the car looked like. As we pulled into my mom’s driveway, my wife turned to me and said, “Can I have it?”

She drove the car for a while until she had cancer. She’s fine now, but after chemotherapy she decided the car smell like chemo, and we bought her a new car. I loved driving that sports car. It could take corners at just about any speed, which isn’t good for your driving point total. I don’t know how many tickets I got, but eventually I had enough points to endanger my driver’s license. I could get the points reduced in half by going to traffic school, and so I did.

Eventually the car wouldn’t pass inspections, so I sold it. I got older and started going the speed limit. It’s just not as fun unless you are in a sports car, so I rarely get tickets anymore. The contradiction to this statement happened when I decided to leave the slow lane on the freeway.

There is a place on the freeway where every day there seemed to be a slow down at a particular part of the road. All of the cars were going around a slight corner, and for some reason, no one was able to keep going the speed limit. So everyone slows to a crawl.

I decided to leave the safe, slow right lane where I am nearly always found these days. I went to the middle lane, and it was slowing down, too. So I moved to the fast lane, and I was still going way too fast. The cars in the fast lane were stopped. The car in front of me was stopped. I didn’t think I was going to be able to stop.

I was right. I skidded a bit and hit the car in front of me going about 5 miles per hour. It was really more of a soft tap so I doubted there was even going to be a dent. But then I looked in the mirror. The guy behind me was not slowing down. He was going about 35 to 40 miles per hour, and he rammed my car hard enough to bounce me into the car in front of me again, and this time I hit the guy in front of me hard enough to knock his hat off.

So now I had been in a three car pile-up. We were the only three who had an accident. Everyone else was cautious enough to not hit someone else. So we checked out our damage and pulled off the side of the road. The police officer had us pull to the next exit to clear the freeway, and I was supposed to be teaching in about an hour. Here’s the problem. I got a ticket for hitting the guy in front of me. The guy behind me got a ticket for hitting me. So writing the tickets took longer than I thought it might. I had to call one of the students in my class and tell them to go home.

The guy in front of me had an old junker like me. He checked for damage on his car, and decided there really wasn’t a reason to file a claim. He was just glad he wasn’t carrying big pieces of metal in the back of his car like he usually did. My car also didn’t seem to be damaged at all, and I attribute that to the spare tire which hangs on the back of my Jeep type car. The guy behind me had hit right into the tire. I later saw that the tire and the door were moved a bit forward, and the door wouldn’t open any more but I usually don’t use that door anyway.

So the two of us in the front had little or no damage. Who I really felt sorry for was the guy who hit me. He was driving a fairly new pickup truck, and the tire on the back of my car had demolished his front end. The hood was bent up, the fender was crushed, and the headlights had fallen to the ground. There must have been thousands of dollars in damage. He had no one to blame but himself.

Of the three cars involved, he was driving the nicest. Of the three cars, he had the most damage. Is there a moral to this story?

It may be ‘drive a junker, and stay in the slow lane’.

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