the pod bay door

¦¦ I was driving to work this morning, west on 23rd Avenue. I sped up a bit to catch up to vehicle in front of me, so that I wouldn’t have to yield to a whack of cars about to turn north on 119th Street. As I approached my turn (from 23rd, turning right, i.e., north on 119th Street), I hit ice, and lost control of my car. It spun to the right, did a 180, jumped the curb, and slammed into the windrow of snow that had been pushed up onto the boulevard by graders a few days earlier. Wearing my seat belt most likely prevented me from slamming into the window of my door. I was lucky that another vehicle wasn’t following me at that moment.

I was stunned for about a nanosecond, realized immediately that I couldn’t open my door, and crawled out through the passenger door. No, I don’t own a cell phone, and realized I had to walk back to Saddleback Road (approx 115th Street), and call the Alberta Motor Association to come pull me out. I left the car with the hazard lights on, praying that no one would hit it coming around the corner. Eight minutes later I reached a phone, I made the call, and started to walk back. I noticed from afar that vehicles were slowing down to a stop at the yield where I’d spun my car, and started running, thinking it might have been hit. As I got closer, I saw that another car had spun into the windrow to avoid hitting me. Three men were trying to dislodge the car from the snow for the driver, a woman, who told me she saw my car as she was rounding the corner, and panicked.

One of the men had a shovel. I had one in my trunk, so we both shovelled more snow, and then four of us dislodged her car, and she left. Then two of the men tried to help me with my car, despite the impending arrival of the AMA tow truck. Less than 5 minutes later, the tow truck arrived, and using the winch, slowly pulled my car out of the windrow (which, btw, is what we call a long row of snow piled up from grading, even though the word means a row created by wind.)

In the end I was mostly embarrassed for driving like a idiot. Trying to save myself 10 seconds, I lost 45 minutes. Lesson learned, I drove off to work. At 51st Avenue, I came upon a large pickup truck, which was stalled. The driver was trying to push it himself. I thought, one good turn deserves another, and pulled over to help him push it off 119th Street, away from the other vehicles.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 26th, 2003 at 23:51 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.