Why I Hate Thursdays

So about a week and a half ago, I’m driving home around 5:40pm in typical rush hour traffic near UCSD. There are a ton of cars near a major intersection that connects to I-5 North, but it’s your standard Southern California stop and go traffic, nothing out of the ordinary. The car in front of me stops, and then I stop. And when I say “stop,” I don’t mean that we came to a screeching halt or anything; I mean that we simply stop, you know, like normal people.

Well, fuckhole in back of me (read: blonde in SUV + cell phone = death) decides that she doesn’t really feel like stopping is all that necessary at this point in her life, so… CRASH! She rear-ends me. Metal ripples, glass shatters, tires pop, plastic rips. Then… BANG! I’m shoved right into the car in front of me. Bumpers scrape, paint shreds, hood buckles, and glass once again shatters. HISS! My radiator’s exploded, making a nice 8-foot geyser of steaming hot fluid to entertain passersby. I coast over to the side of the road, my car having died, but still enough inertia from the impact to roll along lifelessly.

We get out as fellow commuters continue to run over parts of our cars, like my front license plate, a chunk of my bumper, and glass from the broken headlights of Blonde Death Reaper’s SUV. It sounds like a rhythmic “crunch-crash, crunch-crash… crunch-crash, crunch-crash” as cars continue to mangle bits of my BMW.

Blonde Death Reaper runs up to me and is crying hysterically, something which sounds like “SOB-mydadscar-SOB-imsosorry-SOB-why-SOB-ijustgotanewjob-SOB-ohmygod-SOB-areyouokay-SOB-iwasntpayingattention-SOB.” The driver of the car I hit, who is surprisingly calm, walks up to me with a WTF-type look on her face. I simply say: “she hit me, I hit you,” she retorts with an “ah” of recognition and is instantly cooled out. I fight the queasy surge of adrenaline, kick into crisis management mode, survey the scene to ensure that none of us have any bloody or missing bits, that our cars are safely off the main thoroughfare, and then reach in and hit my hazard lights. I suggest that Cool Hand Sally call 911 while I try to calm Blonde Death Reaper down, then we’ll start the obligatory exchange of info. She agrees.

Yadda-Yadda-Yadda, a tow truck swiftly comes to load me up (I notice the trail of gasoline leaking from the rear of my car off the bed of the tow truck at this point), Cool Hand Sally departs, and I leave Blonde Death Reaper at the scene awaiting her own tow truck (seeing me on the phone, Princess Death Reaper actually had the audacity to ask if I’d called one for her too). Riding home, the tow truck driver gets lost – despite him saying that this is his usual beat, and I start feeling some really acute pain in my neck and back, along with a pounding headache. I begin imagining the x-rays and heaps of bullshit I’ll be going through all weekend long with insurance companies, urgent care clinics, salvage yards, and unexpectedly shopping for a new car.

And so… BMW #5 in my long streak of rides is no more. A "total loss," as they say in the insurance biz, where the cost of the repairs would outweight the relative value of the car.