Left Turn Terror

Many of you already know that Monday I was involved in a car crash. Just for y'all I used my oh so famous artistic skills to draw you a picture of the incident on Paint (my art has become a running joke between myself and my students :-p) Okay let me describe what you are seeing. I am sitting in the gray car waiting to turn left into a shopping center. There is another car I have colored orange waiting behind me, and yet another car I have colored blue waiting to turn left out of the complex. The green arrows shows what we were all trying to do. The red line shows what actually happened.

As I waited for an opening in traffic the Duke Med. Student decided he could make the left turn out of the complex between me and the car behind me. Don't ask me how he out paced the on-coming traffic! He miscalculated the amount of space between the two cars and ended up running into my rear passenger bumper. The man in the orange car and another pedestrian rushed over to make sure we were okay. Nobody was hurt, because it wasn't a huge crash. After getting back into his car and driving away, the gentleman in the orange car returned to the scene, walked past the med student, and handed me his business card saying "I saw the whole thing. You did nothing wrong it was totally his fault. If there are any questions call me and I will tell them the whole thing." While it was true that I didn't get hurt; I was shook up after my first car accident. It was nice to have some reassurance that I didn't have to take responsibility for even a small amount of the problem! 15 minutes later the police officers showed up, wrote up a report, and sent us on our way.

As you can see, my Hyundai didn't come away in perfect condition...one of the taillights is busted, the whole right half of the back is scraped and scratched, there is a 2 inch tear just right of the light, and I am still unable to get pieces of glass out of the plastic. Poor guy will probably end up paying big bucks to replace my bumper and light for something that looked so minimal in the twilight hours of Monday evening. His little Toyota definitely got the brunt of it!

This year I have 3 more reasons to be Thankful tomorrow: #1. Nobody got hurt #2 My car is still drivable #3 His insurance will pay for the whole thing.