and I’m glad, glad, glad I did it. And not only am I not in trouble for it, I got its driver arrested. With any luck, he’ll have weeks and weeks to get the SUV repainted while he’s waiting for his driver’s license to be restored. 
Situation: my neighbor is an elderly woman who has Parkinson’s Disease AND had a hip replacement just six weeks ago. This morning I took her to a drugstore so she could pick up some needed items, and also have a reason to get in a little walking exercise inside this biggish store. We’re in VT, you see, and between the vicious cold and the frozen slush and such on the streets and sidewalks, strolling around outdoors just isn’t on for her.
There are three “handicapped” parking slots right beside the door of this store, and a continuing row of ordinary slots all the way down that side. On the way there I had been debating internally over claiming one of the handicapped slots – morally right, I think, but I don’t have a placard – but all three were occupied so I just continued down and took place 6.
The shopping went fine, though very slow, as can be expected with my neighbor’s condition. Then we left the store and began creeping our way past the line of cars to reach my car. We were keeping pretty close to the back of the cars, I was maybe 12-18 inches away from their bumpers, to leave as much room as possible for the cars passing along that aisle to get by easily. We had to walk side by side so I could help support her with my left arm, you see. I had the shopping bags and my purse looped on my right arm.
We were squarely behind the car in slot #2 when it suddenly started backing into us.
I yelled “stop” as loudly as I could, and lashed out with my right arm – the idea being to thump on the back of the car to get the attention of the oblivious idiot who clearly hadn’t bothered to look in the mirrors before backing up. Meanwhile my neighbor was scared and tried to hurry, which resulted in her ‘good’ leg sliding on a bit of ice and she fell to the ground, pulling me with her.
Well, you can probably imagine the foofarah that arose. The SUV slammed on the breaks and didn’t actually hit us, though my arm was pulled all the way down it’s reaf as I fell and the bumper was actually pressed against my shoulder as I sat there. Other pedestrians nearby hurried up to help us, especially with my neighbor, who was crying out in pain. Drivers from cars who were now blocked from moving got out of their cars and rushed to see what they can do. It must have been a full minute before the driver of the SUV, a big guy in a business suit bothered to get out of the car and come back to assess what was going on.
Would you like to know what the first words out of his mouth were? An apology? Inquiries as to whether my neighbor or I was hurt? An offer to call for an ambulance?
Hell, no. He took one look at the back of his precious car and screamed at me: YOU KEYED MY CAR! I’M CALLING THE POLICE!
So I screamed right back: GOOD! BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T, I’M GOING TO!"
Okay, there were at least a half dozen scratches, more like gouges, running down the back of his car, from below the window all the way onto the bumper and on. It looked like hell – but we’re talking about fucking car paint! There were two women lying on the ground, one an 87 year old woman screaming in pain, that you almost ran over. Where are your priorities???
(Technically, btw, it wasn’t a keying. My purse has a sort of military style, with a whole bunch of pockets and pouches held shut with buckles on one side, with the other side plain leather. As chance had it, it was the buckled side that was what hit against the back of his car as I lashed out.)
When I said that I plained to call the cops, some sense that he was in hot water seemed to trickle into this idiot’s brain. He started apologizing then, though still mainly focusing on the damned paint. “Oh, forget about the paint, I’ll take care of that, now, let’s get you up and I’ll get out of the way…”
Oh, yeah, right. There was ZERO chance I’d let anyone other than an ambulance crew move my neighbor in the circumstances. Plus several of the bystanders had already made calls to 911. Fortunately that drugstore was less than a mile from the town’s combined police/fire station, and a police car was there within four minutes, with an ambulance close behind.
The cops took in the situation, got statements from a whole handful of people who had been walking towards the store and had seen everything. The imbecile’s excuse for almost killing us? Oh, he’d looked in the mirrors, he claimed, and did’t see us. We must have ‘rushed’ behind his car after he’d started to move. (Oh, yeah, we did a lot of ‘rushing’ that morning.) The cop didn’t buy the rushing bit. We were squarely behind his car, we couldn’t have moved that fast, if he didn’t see us it must have meant he didn’t even look. The driver insisted that he HAD looked, he just wasn’t able to see us. Why was that? Well, it was his wife’s SUV and she’s much shorter, and he’d been in “too much of a hurry” to adjust the rear view mirrors…
Upshot: my neighbor is in the local hospital, being checked out. So far it looks like sprains and scrapes, and a lot of pain from wrenching the not-fully-healed muscles and such from her operation.
The driver was arrested and taken away, to be charged with reckless driving and I don’t know what else, though the cop thought he’d be getting his licence suspended for a few months at least. And, yeah, the cop noticed he was in handicapped slot with no right to be there, maybe there’s a fine for that.
And the cop was all sorts of concerned with the damage to the SUV’s pain job. :rolleyes:
