A Teachable Moment?
 

Yesterday I'm out on my evening walk and I see this lady pull into her driveway with her nice car. It's a very short driveway- maybe 40' from the garage to the curb- and it's got a decent upward slope from the street. She stops right in the middle of it and proceeds to take five minutes to get out of the car (WHY do so many people DO THAT??? :mad: ), engine running, driver's door wide open, and goes to the curbside mailbox to get and sort through and possibly read all her mail. :rolleyes:

WELL in the meantime it becomes evident that she never put the car in PARK... so while she's in the middle of fiddling with her mail, the car at some point decided to park itself in the garage. When the wide-open driver's door smacked the garage door entrance it let out a helluva slam but that didn't seem to slow the car's forward movement one iota so within seconds the car hit the back of the garage with what sounded like pretty good force.

Yelling out or sprinting over there really would have been pointless as I was too far away to accomplish anything and she probably would have gotten hurt had she tried to dive through the driver's door before it hit the garage. She was lucky (if you can call it that) in one way; there was a shiny new pickup in the two-stall garage already and it didn't get hit.

The moral of the story is: for Gawd's sakes, park that stupid thing and shut the engine off. You have legs; a 40' walk to the curb isn't gonna kill you or even fatigue you (she had no evident physical disability).

I know I'm preaching to the choir here; I'm contemplating a letter to the local rag with the focal point being excessive idling can be bad.

So Frank, what did you learn from this?

I learned that I like schaudenfreude. :thumbup:

In the 20 years I've lived at my house, I've NEVER seen the neighbor lady (not accident lady) walk from the house to the mailbox; it's always done from the idling car. Her butt makes it clear she does not like physical exertion.

You must be a very happy person, considering all that goes on in the world. :rolleyes:

It did add a spring to my step, for sure! :thumbup:

When stupid things happen as a result of stupidity, it seems balance in the world is restored a little bit.

When the initiator of the act is the recipient of the result.

Put another way, there is an awful lot of stupid around here that goes unpunished. When finally a bit of it does, I don't feel too bad.

Just in from tonight's walk... BRRR!!! It appears to have been cruise night for the local Suburban/Yuckon/Denial Club as one in five vehicles was one of them. Oddly enough, I've never seen anything in the paper about a Suburban Club. :confused:

Too funny.

I wonder if the airbag went off... :D

Dunno- she was awful quick to get in there and shut the garage door...

As steep as my driveway is it would have probably gone out the back, a 4 foot drop and might have dropped the house on top of it. Thanks Frank, I'll probably dream about this tonight :mad:.
JK
regards
Mech