2 min read

Enough Already!

Steve Shupe 

It just keeps coming.

With the boys back at home, the amount of laundry has more than doubled. Sunday, the dryer quit working. It left us with a full load of wet sheets and no place to dry them. We're not sure whether dryer repair is an "essential service" or not. It seems it us, but we haven't heard back from the repair guy. So now we're making due with draping laundry over the fence.

Then at about 10:30 yesterday morning, we were all started by a deep grinding sound out on the street. About five minutes later, a very young-looking man in an Amazon shirt rang our doorbell and asked me if I owned the blue car parked in front of our house (Suzie's relatively new Subaru). He had run into it while trying to move over to let another car pass on our narrow street. "Run into" meant he'd pushed his large, heavy delivery truck into the left back end of Suzie's car, a slow but powerful hit that crushed the back side panel and left the rear wheel positioned about 20 degrees from vertical.

Estimated damage of about $10,000, and the car is un-drivable. The delivery van wasn't owned by Amazon, it was leased from Hertz by a local company under contract with Amazon. Afterwards the young man (a polite, apologetic immigrant from India) asked us not to report the accident, but rather to let him and his uncle pay for the damage (this was before we got the $10,000 estimate), because the young man would lose his job if we reported it. We're kind enough people to say we'd consider it, but I don't think the uncle can come up with ten grand, and in any event I would assume that the company that leased the truck will need to report the damage to the delivery truck to its insurer. (In a bit of symmetry, the right front wheel of the delivery truck was also damaged enough that the delivery truck needed to be towed.) So that's all in flux, though it has the makings of a "no good deed goes unpunished" story, which makes us wary.

If adversity makes you stronger, we must be approaching Mr. Universe size. Enough already!