Brian's Blog

Today turned out to be a bad day. I got a call today while paying bills that my wife was in a car accident. She and the kids are fine. No one was hurt. But, the car is in a bad way. Being it's age and the damage I'd be very surprised if it's not ruled a total loss, leaving us with one car to get both my wife and I to work and the kids to and from daycare. This should get interesting since Cindy just took on a job that has longer hours and, of course, I just changed to a job with longer hour expectations.

Here's the part where I put on the sob story, but I just have to vent a bit. In addition to this we need about $2500 to $3000 of brick pointing work done on our house and Cindy's crappy insurance hardly covers anything as far as dental work goes. I'm looking at another $800 for dental work. Now we need a car. Great... Time to accelerate that MCSE upgrade even more I guess! :/

So, the specifics as far as I can tell are that Cindy was driving straight on Linden in Bethlehem heading home from shopping. And the other driver blew through a stop sign and hit here in the driver side door. From what Cindy says the other driver was very young. I only saw a glimpse of her as she was leaving when I got there. Both her and her passenger were, I'd guess, not much more than 18. Plus, supposedly, this is her 3rd accident. Her claim was that she slid through the stop sign on the wet road and tried to accelerate to get though the intersection so as to not block traffic on the busy road. And it is very busy at that spot.

I took my digital camera and snapped some pictures just in case the insurance gets difficult. I blew them up on my screen and looked for any skid marks other than my wife's as she was pushed off the side of the road and almost into a power pole and found none. It sure look to me, like I said before, that she just blew through.

I'm paranoid now too about the insurance company. The last time we had any kind of accident the cop wrote up an ambiguous report and the other operator lied. So, Erie did nothing. I won't go into the specifics on that was, but it boiled down to the fact that you can, under the correct conditions, just lie your way out of being at fault. I'm hoping that the officer wrote up a decent report, I'll check when I can get the report at the station. Still, I'd been paying Erie to protect my family for years without a claim and they didn't deliver. I payed them for a service I didn't get. At least this time we have witnesses and pictures. We'll see. This one should be more clean cut just by the nature of it.

I may or may not toss the pics up in a gallery, it's not exactly something that one usually sticks in the family album. But the pic up there gives an idea of the damage. It looks worse in person though. The alignment is way off and you can see caps between the fenders and the hood. I'm no car expert but I won't be surprised if there is a lot of hidden internal damage. It was barely drivable to get home after I put the spare on.

This sucks, no matter how hard you try it's impossible to get a head it seems. Still, I'm so glad Cindy and the kids are OK. It's amazing the things you take for granted until something happens that has the potential to take them way.

Enough of my venting for the moment. Time to go do something that doesn't make me angry.