Where not to park your car.. lesson learnt.

Nobody explained this to me explicitly when I was learning to drive but:is not an appropriate place to park one's car. Rewinding one hour, I left my apartment to go to my parent's place for lunch(the Sunday usual). Everything was going good, I was taking my time driving slowly, I even stopped at the stop light when I saw it changed to amber instead of going through.

It all went downhill after the stop light changed to green as I drove ahead and came across some fool in another grey civic hatchback driving ridiculously slow whilst chatting on his phone, and randomly pressing on his brakes at arbitrary points in time. I thought to myself that its Sunday my tank is basically at e and I didn't plan to go to the gas station till Monday so I should just continue driving easy and stay behind him. He continued to increasingly annoy me to the point that the only option was to overtake him and kick up as much dust doing so. So I did this after entering a two lane one way road and it was executed successfully and safely. The only difference is that my mood has changed from this individuals casual Sunday stroll when other people have more important things to do so after overtaking him I went around a pretty sharp corner on the same one way road and decided to skip on the brakes. He was going at about 20mph so I was probably going at 30mph after overtaking him, still a safe speed to negotiate the wide radius 90 degree corner at in my car or so I thought.

I have many times before handbrake turn and slide around sharper corners but that was not the aim this morning, my aim was to get as far away from this Sunday morning driver as possible. So after coming out of the corner the car had a bit of oversteer and in efforts to correct this horrible situation the car ended up swiftly swinging in the opposite direction of the oversteer sliding sideways along the road then hitting the curb and ended up parked on this fence. meh, I would say that this has ruined my day but my day was already ruined after somebody within my company called me at 5:34am this morning explaining to me that they did some major upgrading work on some of the GSM network equipment and needed my assistance. That story would pan out to a priority 1 service being downed for my company resulting in people not being able to receive phone calls made to the GSM phones provisioned tomorrow but thats a long ongoing story and lets not bore you with work related matters.

I assessed the situation, I was stuck on somebody's fence, I reached down and grabbed my phone and look back only to see the annoying grey civic man stop for a minute looking at the scene, he didn't even stay and he was one of the main reasons I was in the dilemma. My drivers side door was damaged by the impact and couldn't be opened so I exited through the front passenger door to a big crowd of people who seemed to be concerned about me and possibly any other person in the vehicle. I explained to them that I was fine, there wasn't even a scratch nor bump on me, and that there was nobody else in there and they insisted that I sit down, go to the hospital, forget about the car and the fence, the seat belts saved my life,... going on and on not making the situation any better. The only idea of use contributed by them was to have some water which they spotted in my car so I went for my bottle and had a sip, the sun was pretty hot. Anyway being a progressive person I ignored them and went on to inspect my car and contact my mechanic (who serviced it three days earlier, salt in my wound). He said he would send a wrecker for me to tow it to his garage, the first step in getting my car back on the road :-p.
Anyways I made my way back up to the road and who is that I see? My sister's sister in law, I have long given up going anywhere and not be spotted by people and it was nice to know atleast one person in the crowd of on lookers which by now has grown to about 30 people. Every last one of them wanted to know how I managed to get the car lodged in the fence given that it was a one way road going in the opposite direction to the placement of the car. Let me just state for the record, believe it or not I was not speeding but I have learnt a valuable lesson in sharp corners, front wheel drive cars and road rage and walked away from it with only an injury to the bank.

At this point in time, I have sourced a temporary vehicle and the last thing left to do is work out the financing of the repairs to my car and the fence. Hopefully this doesn't break the bank and my budget as I have waited/planned/expected my horrible unforeseen expense for this half of the year earlier this year. It seems as if something of this nature happens to me twice yearly and I was overdue. I also think of events such as this as the universe evening things out as most people including myself see me as a not so nice person, karma :(. I realized a few months ago that there was a huge surplus in the current budget and set a ridiculous financial goal for the end of this calendar year to compensate for the excess. After firing up my book keeping application after this accident, I realize I was right smack on track on meeting this goal. Its a shame that I will now have to revert back to the old goal so I can finance the repairs.. Oh well, some things are too good to be true.