Rest In Peace, 'Rolla...

:c

Wednesday morning in South Everett, Jade and I were waiting at a stop light. Randomly looked in my rearview, and out of nowhere a burgundy Taurus comes hurtling at us in between the left hand turn lane and the lane we were in, crashing into the driver side of my bumper, tail light and smashing in the back side panel. The guy was super old, and blind (black glasses and all), which I could not believe. I've never been in a situation like this on my own, so I totally panicked and couldn't even figure out that I couldn't start my car up to move out of traffic because I had never shut off the ignition.

I made sure Jade was okay, then finally figured out what I needed to do to get my car out of everyone's way. We pulled into the nearest 7-11 where this guy proceeded to walk inside, pull out some random brunette lady and tell her he hit her car. Ummm, what? I stood outside of my car and watched from right across the lot while he walked over to her car and started looking at the front end of it for damage. Huh? Excuse me, sir! The flaming red-headed woman you just rear-ended in the teal car is right over here!

So he comes over and starts looking for the damage. I AM NOT KIDDING, YOU GUYS. We were standing right in front of it. I blurted out, "You can't SEE that?"

This whole thing was just a nightmare. I should have called the police, but in a daze, all I could do was demand the guy's insurance info (and he brought a huge box of stuff out of his car and had me dig around for the policy paperwork. I'M SO SERIOUS.). After that, I took off and filed a claim with his insurance company immediately after we got home.

So far, I've had the car looked at by a local body shop, and it was officially considered a total loss, with $4,300 in damages. After a few days of correspondence between the insurance company and the body shop, it's looking like I'm going to be reimbursed for the current market value of the vehicle, but who knows how long that'll take. I'm expecting to know more by Monday. For now, I have no car! Which sucks really hard, considering this is Jade's birthday week and I had stuff I was supposed to do next week. I also feel disgustingly out of control when I don't have a vehicle.

I sort of want to feel bad about wishing I had called the police, but then again I don't. How does this guy have a license? I'm not trying to be a jerk to the elderly, here. I'm just baffled as to how someone who is legally BLIND is allowed to operate a giant metal piece of machinery. As if it's not bad enough that this guy rear-ended a woman and her toddler, I keep thinking, what if we hadn't been there? What if someone had been crossing the street at that moment? It makes me pretty sick.

I'm thankful that everyone is okay, but man. What a crappy week :/