Lesson: Learned

Over the weekend, I managed to get into my first (and hopefully last...) car accident. Granted, I'm not really sure it can be classified as a "car accident," because that implies two cars were involved--perhaps I should rephrase: this weekend, I crashed the car into the garage.

I was driving home from the library after a Calculus project meeting on Saturday morning, with my father in the passenger seat. I was tired, and after spending two hours calculating rainbow angles, my mind was wandering elsewhere. I drove us home without incident, but my concentration began to lag as I pulled into the garage, and I clipped the side of the garage with the right bumper--which in the larger scheme of things isn't that big of a deal, considering done that before with no lasting damage to car or garage done.

Then I hit the brakes--except they weren't the brakes. I had panicked because I was spacing out, and in my hurry, I'd hit the accelerator. I pressed it down as I would the brakes, which is much harder than I usually do on the accelerator, and the car, my father, and I went zooming straight into the back wall of the garage.

In reality, it probably took all of three seconds for the car to make contact with the shelf in front of us, but it felt like five minutes. My dad did a hybrid screech/scream for the entire time, but I didn't make a sound. We hit the shelves in front of us with an almighty crash.

When I finally hit the brakes and stopped the car, my dad couldn't get away fast enough. He leapt out of the car while I sat frozen, clutching the parking brake and afraid to take my feet off the brake. I couldn't believe that everything had gone so wrong so quickly.

I eventually got out of the car, and when my dad backed the car out of the garage, I was horrified to see what I had done --->

I couldn't decide whether I should laugh or cry. So I did both--especially when I smelled the burning plastic.

They had to tow the car away, and the insurance appraisal was not pretty--and the estimated cost didn't even include the damage to the hood because the appraiser was afraid the hood wouldn't close again if he opened it.

All in all, it wasn't a good experience, but I've decided to take what I can from it. First of all, I'm grateful that my error in judgement didn't take place on the road with another car and that no one was hurt. I'm also glad that a shelf was in the way and I didn't break our house.

I have no one but myself to blame for what happened, and I now know better than to dismiss my mother's nagging about remembering which one is the brake and which one is the accelerator. I know I should have been focusing, and that I shouldn't have assumed I was home safe just because I could see the garage. I'm going to be paying much more attention before blithely pushing a pedal down from now on, because really, it's scary how quickly things can go wrong.