On my way home from work today I was sitting at a stop light when something in a parking lot distracted me for a few seconds. While I was looking over my left shoulder a thunderous crunch tore through the car. It was horribly jarring and it took me a few seconds to piece together what was happening. The light had turned green and the car in front of me was just starting to pull away. Looking through my rear-view mirror revealed a silver car about the size of my own Honda Civic, but it was literally touching my bumper! I had been rear-ended.

I stared intently at the front bumper of the car through the mirror until I remembered that Arizona doesn’t require (or, possibly, even allow) cars to have license plates on the front of their cars. I signaled that I was going to pull over, and they did the same. As we both approached the side of the road, I came to a stop, and the other driver sped off at full speed. I didn’t have time to get any of the info from their rear license plate, and I was positioned in such a way that it was difficult for me to quickly get into traffic and make chase.

I pulled into the nearest parking lot and got out of the car. There was almost no visible damage to the car. A minor scratch was visible, but it looked better than what I’d have expected had a shopping cart tapped into the back of me. I was very upset that the other driver was so amoral that they wouldn’t stop. I likely wouldn’t have even done anything with their insurance information, it’s just the principle of the thing that got me.

When I got back into the car and pulled back onto the road I noticed the absence of the familiar rhythmic clicking sound associated with turn indicator usage. All the way home I had to manually blink the turn indicators on and off because, although the light would come on, it wouldn’t blink. The hazard lights didn’t work right either.

After playing with the hazard lights and the turn indicators for about an hour they are working again. It really doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t really do anything to make them work, so I am guessing that they will stop working as suddenly as they started. As Davis’s Dictum states: Problems that go away by themselves, come back by themselves.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Annoyances, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.