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Sometimes it's a fine line
Jan. 17th, 2007 10:40 pmI was waiting at the lights on the way home from work tonight when the guy next to me ran the red in the right-turning lane (it's Australia so we drive on the left here). Because he was running it he went around really fast so he swung wide. At the exact same time, someone coming from the other direction ran their red right-turning signal.
Consequence - a head-on crash at some speed with both cars traveling diagonally across the intersection. All I could do was brace. Both cars spun right around in the centre of the intersection, the rear-end of the car from the opposite direction missing the front of my car by the thickness of a coat of paint. I swear I felt my car rock but there was no impact. Of course, some dickhead from the other direction then took off and rammed right into both of them. This all took just seconds to happen - utter mayhem and chaos. The one small mercy in all of this is that it is the corner where the ambulance base is so there was one of them there in seconds (it was probably a bit longer than that, I know) and the police arrived almost as fast.
I stopped to help but there were already that many people there that I didn't think I would help so I got back in the car and kept going. It was only when I got back in my car that I realised that I had stopped about 3-4 feet short of the intersection. If I had been on the white line, I think I would have got hit fairly hard as the cars spun around. I think it was about then I started to shake!
Sometimes it really is "a fine line between pleasure and pain"!
Consequence - a head-on crash at some speed with both cars traveling diagonally across the intersection. All I could do was brace. Both cars spun right around in the centre of the intersection, the rear-end of the car from the opposite direction missing the front of my car by the thickness of a coat of paint. I swear I felt my car rock but there was no impact. Of course, some dickhead from the other direction then took off and rammed right into both of them. This all took just seconds to happen - utter mayhem and chaos. The one small mercy in all of this is that it is the corner where the ambulance base is so there was one of them there in seconds (it was probably a bit longer than that, I know) and the police arrived almost as fast.
I stopped to help but there were already that many people there that I didn't think I would help so I got back in the car and kept going. It was only when I got back in my car that I realised that I had stopped about 3-4 feet short of the intersection. If I had been on the white line, I think I would have got hit fairly hard as the cars spun around. I think it was about then I started to shake!
Sometimes it really is "a fine line between pleasure and pain"!
