Today could be the first day of the rest of your life
It's been a week since I blogged and mostly it's been staying busy with work, trying to get on top of all the projects I have and most importantly remember the passwords for all my VMs that I seem to have now forgotten. However today was a bit of an experience I never had before. I got into a car accident. 24 years of driving and I've never actually had an accident. Call me a wuss, but I drive the speed limit and when the road conditions are bad, I slow down and try to keep my cool. Or so I thought.
As I was heading into work this morning I hit a patch of black ice and slush and away I went. My Suzuki XJ7 wiggled along the highway and slammed head first into the concrete barrier that separates the northbound and southbound traffic. It was a hard enough hit to deploy the air bag and shook me up for a second or two. Then I realized I was perpendicular to oncoming traffic and all I could see was headlights. No, it wasn't a "My life flashed before my eyes" moment. It was just a "This sucks" moment as I saw the oncoming traffic. Lucky for me it was 5:30am so traffic was light and the roads were bad (with a light dusting of snow) so everyone was travelling pretty slow (I was only doing 70-80km/h when I hit the barrier as opposed to the 110km/h speed limit). I got the vehicle off the road and discovered there were two other vehicles involved as they swerved to avoid me and ended up hitting each other.
No injuries, although my thumb hurts like the dickens right now (I think I clenched the steering wheel when I hit the barrier) and my chest is sore when it hit the airbag/steering wheel. The other guys had no injuries and damage was pretty minor to their vehicles (back bumper torn off and dent on the side panel of one truck). My damage was a little more severe as the front end was all crushed in (hood buckled, bumper, lights, grill, etc.) and the back bumper was ripped off when one of the trucks swerved to hit me on the side and caught my bumper with his. All in all, I have a pretty good suspicion that my truck is a write-off but they might be able to fix it.
So a sucky way to start the morning and the rest of the day was being mad at myself for what happened and sorting out all the insurance crap and whatnot (including trying to track down a rental car which is increasingly difficult in this city these days). On the positive side, besides being alive and kicking it opened up the idea of buying a new vehicle so we're now looking at something like a Jeep Compass which looks pretty sexy.
Like I said, this wasn't a life altering event for me. It was an accident (and my first). Yes, with a slight twist of events in the timeline of what went down I could have been writing this from the great blog space in the sky or a hospital bed but I'm not so you move on. However it does remind me to remember to live life to it's fullest each and every day. Slow down, enjoy what you have and what's going on around you, and relax. There are probably bigger things in the universe to worry about so don't get your panties in a knot over something silly like property damage.