He can if he’s a ninja too. Kinda sorta anyways. They just look for what ISN’T there. Once they don’t see it, they know another ninja is there.
Yesterday I had an accident; I posted about it “elsewhere”.
I was late for a doctor’s appointment and trying to find the office along a strip mall. I was not paying attention and there was melting slush on the parking lot. When I turned back to look, there was a concrete barrier, about 10 inches high or so, that was sticking out of a turn in the parking lot.
I couldn’t turn, and the car wouldn’t stop on the slush.
BAM! CRUNCH!
At least $4000 worth of damage, bent frame and all, and I have a broken rib now from the seatbelt, as well as other minor injuries. I’ve already missed work from it and will miss more, too.
And you know who’s fault it was? Mine. I didn’t go and yell at the parking lot’s owner for not painting the barrier, I didn’t yell at the office owner for not telling me there was a barrier, and I’m not claiming on my car insurance either. Why? Because it’s my fault, and I bear the responsibility for it, no one else. I’m operating a motor vehicle and that carries with it Responsibilities.
That’s all I have to say.
Jeeze, how fast are you people driving in parking lots? Never mind - I see how fast people drive in parking lots every day. The place where we should drive the slowest, with the utmost care because of the bajillion ways to do damage and hurt ourselves and other people, we drive around in like it’s an empty freeway.
Yes, because you can draw the conclusion from what I wrote that I was going 75mph in a parking lot…I know this is the SDMB Pit, but let’s try to not to think the worst of everyone when facts aren’t in evidence.
I was actually going about 15mph, in an empty parking lot along the edge. There was a point where the edge turned in and I was too distracted and stupid to notice. The speed I was going was perfectly safe in it unless I wasn’t paying attenion. Since I wasn’t paying attention, NO speed was safe.
I fucked up, and I’m paying for it. No one else is, and you can’t even say I “drove up insurance rates” because I’m not claiming insurance.
Okay, but why not? If you purchase collision insurance, isn’t that how you take responsibility for this sort of thing? At least in NC you’re not required to have collision insurance: if you don’t want to to drive up rates for other folks’ insurance, save money by not buying collision insurance.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you; just baffled.
Daniel
I think of insurance as being there for 1) things that are not my fault, or 2) things that are catastrophic. $4000 is a fair amount but it’s not catastrophic by a long shot. My injuries will not go away by money (broken ribs heal on their own); if anyone else had been in the car or involved I would have invoked insurance at once so they would be taken care of, of course. So it’s not that I have a general opposition to using it, but that I feel in this case weighing my idiocy with the actual damages and such make it that I should suck it down and write out the check myself. If this means I cancel a vacation later on or don’t buy something I wanted, so I stay in budget this year, then so be it. If one doesn’t take responsibility for their own Missouri Mule Stupidity as an adult, then when do they?
Do you have collision insurance? If so, that’s specifically insurance for things that ARE your fault, as I understand it. No problem if you don’t believe in having insurance for such occasions, but if you’ve got objections to using it, you ought to consider cancelling the policy (or at least adding a humongous deductible to it): no sense paying for something you’re not going to use.
I’ve never had to use my collision insurance, knock on wood. But if the occasion came, I’d figure the way I’d taken responsibility for my mule-headed stupidity was by paying my collision insurance premium for the past decade or so.
Daniel
It’s always good policy not to get your insurance company involved in paying for a minor accident, especially if it’s your own fault and you can afford not to. The premiums not only have a tendency to go up very rapidly, but I’ve heard far too many horror stories of people in recent years being dropped completely by their insurance company for as few as two accidents, even if they’re not at fault in either.
Well, that’s fair. Four thousand bucks is an awful lot of money to me, probably more than my car and my wife’s car put together; that affects my thoughts about whether I’d let my insurance pick it up.
Daniel
Here’s the difference:
$4,000 in collision damage - I can bear by moving things in my budget
$14,000 in collision damage - I make a claim
Does that make more sense when I say things that are catastrophic? What I’m saying is, IMO the insurance should be used either for things that are not my fault, or things that I cannot bear financially. I would certainly use it if it was bad enough. If even $500 is too much for someone else financially then I don’t blame them for making a claim, I mean, how could I? Everyone’s got different situations and responsibilities. But I won’t go out of my way to make a claim for a moderate amount where it’s my fault and I feel stupid about it. Yes, I’m hard on myself, but that’s me.
I don’t think I can explain it any better, so if you still disagree, then I respect your disagreement.
I’ve not had an accident in 17 years, and I’ve never made an insurance claim in my life. The last one was about $2000 in damage and was my fault as well (another single-car one, I slid on ice and hit a bridge) so I paid for that myself. I’ve been very fortunate, careful, or both, not to cause a more serious accident or hit other people (of course, I’ve been in a very serious accident, but that wasn’t my fault as I wasn’t driving.)
Re the notion of getting your sister, the general manager at another restaurant in the chain, to step in and bring pressure to the other restaurant is questionable. I can’t imagine a worse idea. If I was a Regional Manager and I heard that one of my GM’s was threatening or otherwise making life difficult for another unit’s employees due to some relative’s parking mishap I would be inclined to fire or discipline the GM making a pain of themselves.
Even asking your sister to do this (or anything similar for you) could well put her in a precarious position careerwise and would look very unprofessional if she did engage the issue. Your parking issues should not become her problem.
Wow. That’s flash.
Couple of things.
- Look up who “FreakFreely” was on these boards, and read up on him. Topic starters that change their story after the OP are sometimes frowned upon.
- Learn how to drive.
- If you fail at 2, take responsibility for the consequences.
Other than that, have a nice day and all that.
I had to look up what “flash” as an adjective meant, and it was “tastelessly showy”.
I was responding to the direct question of why I did not invoke car insurance and what constituted a time when I would feel like I could. I guess I shouldn’t have taken that bait. My point of my original post was to say that when you have an accident, certain responsbilities are invoked as a result of operating a car.
I thought he meant it as in “cool,” or “serious money,” or both (these aren’t dictionary definitions, but I think I’ve heard them as slang before). Your explanation makes sense to me now; it was just kind of surprising to me last night.
Daniel
If he was a pirate he could see a ninja, but then he’d deliberately run over him.
Yes.
And if Superman had been there, he could have shattered that concrete block into sand with his superbreath, and then there’d have been no incident.
Batman, however, would have been useless.
If Batman were involved, there would have been no incident to speak of since Batman would have prepared himself by checking for obstacles around the Batmobile. Although, the Batmobile probably does this automatically by itself since Batman would have prepared himself by including that feature.
Per Left Hand of Dorkness GuanoLad’s comment is simply indicting that it’s impressive you’ve got enough disposable income to forgo the conventional liability limits in an auto insurance policy.
I have to admit your reasoning seems a bit odd to me as an auto policy is (in my view) a straightforward commercial transaction in the case of a valid accident & coverage limits. There are certainly logical reasons to cover the accident yourself if it is sufficiently small & your insurance rate increase would swamp the out of pocket cost of the repairs, but to set (in your case) 14,000 as the prospective starting point at which you could be bothered to file a claim (assuming you have a standard 250 or so deductible) sort of negates the point of having insurance which is to (more or less) make you whole in the case of an accident in exchange for an actuarial bet made by the carrier that is reflected in your policy cost. I don’t think my health or auto insurance carriers are pondering whether to return the premiums I’ve paid over the years because my payments to them have vastly exceeded any claims I’ve made.
Not if it was 1938 Superman, who didn’t have superbreath.
1938 Batman would have been especially useless, as he didn’t come along til 1939.