Friday morning seemed like it was going to be great.

Most Fridays, after I drop Evie off at school I have a bunch of errands to do, especially now that we’re down to only one car. Grocery store, post office, what have you. But on this particular Friday, I had nothing to do. I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing morning with Oliver at home.

Fate, as it so often does, had other plans.

I was driving Southbound in two-way traffic on a busy street just a few blocks from the school, when one of the cars parked on the side of the street suddenly opened the driver’s side door. The door opened literally maybe 2 feet in front of me. I slammed on my brakes, but there was no chance at all to avoid it. ::boom:: Goodbye driver’s side door!

After I skid to a stop and I sat there for a minute thinking, “What the heck just happened?” I pulled over to the curb and ran back to see if the guy was okay. It happened so fast I really didn’t know if the guy was stepping out of the car when I hit the door, or if the door swung back and crushed him, or if a piece came off and impaled him to his seat, or what. He was fine and he was like, “How’s your car?” and that’s when I realized I hadn’t even looked at my car.

It wasn’t too bad. Cracked bumper, dented fender and I was missing my rear-view mirror on the passenger side. Certainly drivable. The same couldn’t be said for his car. The guy was actually really cool and we joked about things a little. His was a company car (he’s an exterminator), so he radioed back to base and they said they wanted to file a police report. However, the company was not local, so I called the police and we waited for someone to show up.

Oliver was due for a nap and he fell asleep in my arms pretty quickly, so he slept for the whole ordeal. I was really glad I didn’t have Evie with me. First off, that girl is built out of empathy. She would have wept and wept for our broken bumper. Second off, even though Oliver was heavy, it was a much more pleasant wait than it would have been answering question after question about what was happening and accidents in general.

When the police arrived, they informed us that they would not fill out the accident report because both of our cars were (technically) drivable, so we would need to go down to the station to fill out our report.

Guy: “How can I drive the car, I can’t shut my door?”
Cop: “Can’t you tie it shut or something?”
Guy: “Uh…I don’t have any rope with me.”

Ultimately though, his complaints fell on deaf ears, and the officer wouldn’t fill it out.  The other interesting thing I learned was that there is a law in Chicago that says anyone opening their door and causing an accident is always at fault. This makes sense of course, but it made me feel hopeful this would actually not be listed as my fault, which it totally wasn’t. At this point, I just don’t expect legal things to go my way, you know?

This leaves me with a conundrum though. The insurance company says they don’t care about getting an accident report. In fact, if the guy’s company hadn’t pressed for it, I wouldn’t have called the police at all. I certainly don’t want to drive to the police station and fill out an accident report and all that entails. However, in my experience with insurance companies, they will do whatever they can do to not have to pay for something, up to and including stabbing me in the face. So, when this inevitably happens, do I want to have to say, “No sir, I didn’t get an accident report.” I can’t control much about the process, but I’d hate to have to admit that I didn’t do everything in my limited power to ensure this goes my way.

One more funny thing I wanted to mention was the training of the insurance people. This lady deserved a SAG card! As I’m describing the accident, she was gasping and consoling like I just told her my family was wiped out in an act of genocide. I had a fender-bender, lady! Nobody was hurt!

Don’t think I’m complaining though! I loved it. Although I didn’t need to be consoled, I sure appreciated the effort. In this day and age, with the terrible customer service that we have, and they took the time to pretend to be interested? Well, there are a few companies around here that could take some notes.