instant carma

You're thinking "hey there, loser, you spelled karma wrong." Yeah, I know. It's on purpose.

I ended my last post (the long, bitchy one where I vented a lot of unexpected anger) by apologizing in case my angry bitching gave anyone a stomachache. I should have apologized to my car which was sitting innocently outside and about to be the recipient of a fat wallop of karma that had been launched in my direction.

Damn, that karma works fast.

Within moments of typing up that post, I closed my front door (which had been open all afternoon and through which I could see my little golden chariot parked placidly on the street not twenty feet away) and went to the bathroom. I don't like to leave my front door open when I go into the bathroom because I don't want anybody swiping my computer which just sits there on my desk in full view of my door. Anyway, three minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom, opened the front door back up and there was my little car, gold and peaceful, exactly as I left it. Or so I thought.

I was about to leave for work and as I gathered my stuff and packed my bag, I became aware of a conversation happening across the street. It sounded like a neighbor was encouraging a solicitor to come to my house. "It looks like her door is open," said my neighbor, "why don't you go over and talk to her." My hackles went up and I was prepared to be not-so-welcoming when the little guy with cornrows walked up and said "Um, hi."

"Yeah...?" I said without even looking up from my bag.

"I hate to be the bearer of bad news..." he trailed off and I realized he wasn't a solicitor. "I just wanted to let you know what just happened to your car..."

Shit.

So I went outside and he explained it all. He'd been walking home from the library just a few minutes before and he saw a huge truck from the City of Portland (whose famous motto is "the city that works"... yeah... works on fucking peoples' cars up...) came along, way too big for the back streets he assured me, and tried to take the tight corner on which my car was parked. Well, not only did he take the corner but he took a big fucking chunk out of my car too. The whole passenger side is scraped, flattend and punctured. The force of the turning truck even picked up the rear end of my car and sat the back right tire up on the curb. And did that big city truck stop? No it did not. Bastards.

The weirdest thing is that I'd been sitting there with the door open all afternoon and I'd just gotten up for three minutes to pee and in those fateful three minutes a big truck came along and hit my car completely unbeknownst to me. If it hadn't been for that guy walking by, I wouldn't have even noticed the damage until I started to drive my car to the dollar store for bingo prizes tomorrow and realized it was up on the curb. Jesus, I probably would've spent the whole day pondering the mystery of how it had gotten up on the curb before I ever even noticed the whole passenger side was scraped up, which would probably have happened as I returned to my car from the dollar store. Then I would've assumed I'd been side-swiped while sitting in the parking lot and the City of Portland would be off the hook. Wow. What luck all around.

Anyway, I went ahead and left for work and told SK all about it. Before I could even think much about what to do, she'd already managed to call the city and get a copy of a form printed off for me with a woman's name and number for me to call tomorrow about it. Meanwhile, that nice cornrow guy was going to see if he could find the truck (which he thought would be somewhere in the neighborhood) to get the identification numbers and put them on my windshield for me. It's nice to have good neighbors. And nice to have a good girlfriend (action-hero) to help sort that junk out. So... yay for me. :-)

Tomorrow maybe I'll write about my stubborn pride and my solitary streak that made it tricky to accept her help. Or maybe I'll just let that sentence speak for itself. We'll see.