The Thing in the Road

Last Tuesday my wife’s car met with an unfortunate incident. I’m only writing about it now because I’ve calmed down enough not to go on a vindictive manhunt against all dumbass pickup truck drivers.

Last Tuesday were on our way to a friend’s house for some dinner. It was just about sunset, dusk, so it was that dark and gloomy half light. It was also raining lightly. We were taking some back roads and we come over a little rise and there, sitting in the middle of the road, is what appears to be a brown shopping bag. I had no time to swerve. If I had, with the slick roads and the narrow shoulder we might have flipped the car. So, riding over it, I’m hoping it was a brown shopping bag.

The huge, metallic chunk-rip-clang sound told me it wasn’t. I pulled the car over, got out, saw reddish transmission fluid spewing all over the road and swore like an 82nd Airborne Infantry soldier. I stomped back to the item that caused the damage and it turns out, it’s one of those heavy duty metal jacks that mechanics use to lift cars, ways about 100 pounds and rolls on four heavy rollers.

Needless to say, this just threw the homicidal maniac switch buried just under the surface of my brain.

After about 5 minutes of swearing up and down and trying to determine who I could kill to take the edge off of some of my anger, we called the cops, our insurance company and our friend to let her know we wouldn’t be making it tonight.

All told, 4000 dollars worth of damage (mostly covered by insurance) and it took me a week to cool down enough to be able to talk about it.

What we and the police came up with is some jackass in a truck was driving with the tailgate down. How the heck someone wouldn’t hear the obvious explosion of that thing falling out the back is beyond me, but now, every time I see some dilwad driving down the street with his tailgate down and stuff sliding around in the back, it pops a vein in my forehead as big as the Euphrates.