Alright then. Since this thread is inspiring a great deal more vehemence than I expected, here’s the completely factual, non-hyperbolic, non-embellished version of it, minus all pompous, over-the-top, prancing rhetoric.
Something urgent came up last night, and I had to leave my house very fast. I came downstairs to find my car hemmed in on both sides. I was completely unable to move it. One of the two cars hemming me in I recognized to be my neighbor’s car. Said neighbor and I have a history, which I will not go into here in detail as it does not pertain to the original post and wasn’t one of my reasons for starting the thread. Suffice it to say that wasn’t the first, fifth or even tenth time he’s done that.
So I’m standing there slowly growing angrier, walking impotently back and forth in the middle of the parking lot while my sister is having a meltdown over at our parents’ house and I can’t be there to help her. This guy is actually doing it again, despite all the tow trucks and cop cars I’ve called on his ass through the months I’ve been living here, and he probably will never learn. As I passed by his car on my way back inside to call a cab my rage welled up, overflowed, and before I knew it I’d given his car a little skritch. I started feeling bad about it the second I did it, because it’s a well known part of Life’s Code of Conduct that you just don’t do that.
I don’t delude myself that I was justified in any way doing that to his car, but it was one of those rare cases where my temper just got the better of me. I’ve been debating with myself whether to go and apologize, but a few things have been stopping me:
-
Judging by the general state of his car (obvious dents in many places, rust, flaking paint, trash strewn across back seat), one little barely visible scratch (Ferret Herder was right; 2 millimeters is very very small) next to one of his headlights is not likely to arouse his ire, even in the unlikely event that he would ever notice it.
-
Under normal circumstances I’m all for admitting my mistakes and apologizing for them, but an earnest apology to this guy would most likely be nothing but a sign of weakness. He probably wouldn’t know whether to laugh louder at the fact that my scratch was so half-hearted or the fact that I’d apologized for something he’d never have noticed in the first place. He would also doubtless proceed to use this incident as leverage the next time we have a parking lot dispute. I mean, this is a man who tried to sue me for having his car towed one night in late November, when he had quite literally parked bumper-to-bumper with me, pinning me against a wall.
The act itself wasn’t a calculated “You motherfucker, let’s see how you like it if I scratch your car up a bit, yeah, let’s see how you like that,” but more a “I’ve had it UP TO GRAA skritch” which was then half-aborted the second I heard the skritchy noise and felt that “Oh, fuck” feeling in my gut that tells you you just did something wrong.
And that feeling, stretched out and hyperbolized, is largely what my OP was about. I wasn’t prepared for you guys to take it at face value quite the way you did, but in retrospect I see that I probably couldn’t have expected anything else. My bad.
Hope that explains something. And for the people who suggested I should run myself over with the guy’s car, I’d like to kindly suggest you take that knee of yours and have some of the nerves severed, 'cause that baby’s jerking a wee bit hard.
And booka… uhh… I had a vague feeling you were being tongue-in-cheek and had a whole thing written out in response, but upon viewing your latest post to this thread… no comment. Yikes.
