I Do Not Like Mondays

WARNING: Gonna be a bit raw and unfiltered here. Situation calls for it.

It was this past Thursday afternoon, April 24, and I’d just left the luncheon that followed my late uncle’s funeral that day in Long Island, N.Y. It’s an hour-and-45-minute drive back to our town in Connecticut, supposed to be, and I needed to pick up my daughter from after-school care by 5:30 p.m. I said my goodbyes around 2:30 p.m., so I tried to leave plenty of time.

Yeah. It was all I could do to get out of Long Island.

It was a traffic frenzy, and tight. Cars were cutting in front of and behind each other so close they almost traded paint. It was a crawl, then a jackrabbit start, often straight into a sudden halt, a few times so abruptly I stood on the brakes. I was in it, that’s all there was to it; I had to somehow find a way through it.

Was some of the most dangerous traffic I’ve ever seen. And it just kept coming, with very few openings into a free flow — and when those happened, they lasted maybe minutes, or seconds.

I don’t know what the hell was going on that day, but something was. Maybe’s just a Thursday afternoon on some of America’s busiest, most crowded roadways; dunno. But the secondary and even local roads running along or near the main routes were jammed up too. What should’ve been an easy ride to reach my daughter was quickly becoming a run to make it in time. (Show up late to get your kid from aftercare a few times and you get kicked out of the program, so the stakes were high.)

At last I reached Connecticut on I-84 East and had to clear only a few more towns to get home. But then there was an accident or something, and the road came to a full stop, inching forward painfully every now and then. No chance to get through that way. GPS routed me off at the nearest exit, which I crawled to get to, onto a street called Mill Plain Road in Danbury. Wasn’t all that far off from my destination, and I was slowly getting closer.

Mill Plain was pretty jammed up as well, but there weren’t any options, and it was moving along slowly at least. Better than I-84, I could see, but I was starting to worry I might not make it in time. I came up on a shopping center/ plaza and an intersection there, eventually moving through the stoplight. Traffic was at a halt on the other side of the light, so I also came to a stop there. Come on… come on… come on… gotta get through this… need to get through this. Then suddenly

<<<<(((({{{{[[[[//// BOOM! \\\\]]]]}}}}))))>>>>

Something hit hard from the rear. Impact was loud. My Jetta kicked forward, but I had the clutch pedal down and my foot on the brake, and it moved only several feet. At least the transmission was disengaged. My neck had jerked and I saw a white flash. Seatbelt pulled to a tight snap.

My phone had been running GPS in a cradle/ holder attached to the dash. It went flying somewhere. Stuff in the car got thrown all over. And my thoughts went straight to the trunk.

That was loaded to the hilt with my gear of all kinds, packed in there like Tetris. There was my photography equipment, some sound recording stuff, some music equipment, a few laptops, a bunch of work stuff. It was some of my best equipment, my choicest gear. I expected the rear of the car had been crunched in pretty bad.

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a Mini Cooper, one of the “big small” new ones, not the teensy classic ones. It was burgundy, I think I saw, maybe with a lighter, silver or greyish hood. Looked like there were some dings and dents in it on the front and sides, and it occurred to me it may have been in a few bang-ups before this one.

None of the airbags in it or in my car had blown. The impact must’ve been *just* short of what would’ve set them off, maybe nine or 10 miles per hour. But it was quite a jolt, nonetheless. Whoever it was had probably been gunning along trying to get through traffic, maybe had looked down at a phone or something for a second, and plowed into me.

F**k, I thought. F*****************k. How will I make it to aftercare now?

Well, it was what it was. I felt okay, so — as you’re supposed to do after a crash in traffic — I threw on my hazards and immediately pulled the car off to the side of the road, and there happened to be an entryway to a business or something along those lines right there, so I pulled the handbrake and opened the door to get out.

I did that just in time to see the driver in the other car speed away.

I think the other car even swerved into oncoming traffic to clear the backup of cars and keep going down the road. I was dumbfounded, taken aback, couldn’t believe it. I didn’t get the license plate or see anything of the driver. The road was a sea of cars all pushing to get forward and through traffic, and they swarmed onward.

There was nothing to be done. I walked around the back of my car and saw, almost in disbelief, not all that much damage.

Well, what the hell. I got back in, got back on the road, and kept going, trying to make it to pick up my daughter. And you wouldn’t believe the route it took me to get back home; GPS kept pushing me farther and farther out of the way in a long, arcing, roundabout network of backroads that, finally and at long last, began heading back toward our town and my daughter’s school.

I arrived in time. In the end I was maybe four or five minutes early, I think it was.

I was a little shaken up by what had happened. If I had gotten my hands on whoever that was that hit me?

I’d have punched you right in your f*****g nose.

No; no. Not the nose. If you hit someone there, you can really do some damage, even send a piece of bone back into the brain. Not the nose.

I’d have busted you right across the head.

No; no. Not the head. Too many vulnerable spots. If you clip the temple, you can cause serious damage, or worse. Hit the jaw and you might break it, marring that person possibly for life.

Not the head.

I’d have put my boot right up your ass. True, I was wearing a dress boot, and it’s like a low boot style. But I like shoes with real, stitched-on soles, and no, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, if I were you.

No; *sigh*. No. You can hurt someone if you do that. It was only me in the car. I was more worried about the car and the equipment in it.

I don’t really have a lot of things, but the things I do have tend to be deliberately special, sometimes one of a kind. I like to keep my things nice. I want them in proper working order at all times, and if possible, perfect. I always say, “Take care of your equipment, and it’ll take care of you.”

So I get real f*****g awful pissed off when someone does something to mess with my stuff like this. Quite furious indeed.

See, the real problem I have here is, what if my daughter had been in the car?

What if someone had been hurt?

To just speed off like a coward, no; that don’t work too well for me.

It’s an accident. Things happen. There was a ton of traffic. We could’ve, and should’ve, exchanged insurance information at least, and made sure everyone involved was unharmed. I don’t know if it was just the other driver in that other vehicle, or if there were others as well.

*Sigh*.

If you had come back, other driver, I would have thanked you, for doing the right thing.

I’m glad my car seems to have taken a pretty good hit like a champ. I checked through all my equipment, and it seems to be okay, too. Stuff still works.

I pulled a couple screws from the other car’s license plate out of my bumper, which has three holes punched in it and some weird indentations now, but generally isn’t too bad. Would’ve been hilarious if the other car’s license plate had made an impression in my bumper’s plastic covering, but no.

They’re supposed to build vehicles these days to be able to take a 10-mph impact and sustain no damage, and that is apparently what happened in this case, for the most part.

I reported the incident to the local police, and the officer said there’s little or nothing that can be done, which, of course, I already knew. The officer told me they get maybe 15 or so of these kind of complaints per day, and they often don’t even file a report. I asked that they at least file a report for this one, just so I have it to reference for any potential repair needed down the line, either of my car or myself, should something weird arise. Hard to tell with these things sometimes.

But I probably will do nothing about it, and will sort of patch up the Jetta as best I can. Maybe I’ll try to get that plastic body piece covering the bumper from another black Jetta of its same generation in the junkyard, if I can find one, and see if I can replace it out sometime. Maybe.

Yet the principle of the matter truly bothers me in this case. I just cannot process how that other driver made the choice he or she did to flee the scene. You don’t do something like that.

Listen, again. Accidents happen. You work them out. Things will be alright. And, meanwhile, when you’re driving — especially when there’s insane traffic — pay attention and keep your eyes on the road. Leave enough distance between you and the car in front of you to stop at the speed you’re traveling. Drive defensively. Don’t — do not — mess with that phone.

And don’t f*****g plow into somebody and speed off like a little spineless s**t. Okay?

Don’t do that either. You solve these kinds of problems, truly you can, but the choice that was made in this case, to me, kinda falls short a ways, unacceptably so. Pretty awful f*****g unacceptably so.

As a human. Don’t do this kind of nonsense. Ain’t right.

Okay?

*Sigh*. 😑😑😑