This is what happens . . .

Ooops!
(August 6, 2007)

. . . when I get really mad at work.

*laughs maniacally*

Seriously though, I had left my windows cracked open when I parked the car in the morning. When I went back out to the car after work I found out, the hard way, that a couple flies had taken up residence in the car.

The "hard way"? Yeah, one of the flies decided to show its displeasure at my return by flying behind the lens of my glasses and then FREAKING out in my eyeball. Of course it waited until I put the car in drive and was actually moving forward.

I, of course, kept my cool and promptly stopped the car to remove the fly lost my cool while trying to scrape the darn fly out from behind my glasses with my fingers. Did I get the fly out from behind my glasses? Why yes I did! But my victory lasted a mere millisecond or two before my eyes focused and my brain realized I was about to smack right into the parking lot pole/post/marker/thingy. In the time between the realization and impact, visions of car repair bills flashed through my mind. Then I was jolted back to reality, quite literally, by the impact and sickening sound of the post scraping along the underside of my car.

When I came to a stop, the post was ripped out of the ground and laying a few feet from where it had started (the above picture is where the maintenance crew put it to get it out of the way). I did trudge back into my office and call Parking Services to explain what I did. I gave them my name and license plate number, told them which parking lot, and what kind of car I was driving. In fact, I had to tell them twice that I had been driving a Beetle. I fully expected them to send me a bill for the repair/maintenance, but I never heard back from them (I don't think they believed a Beetle could do that).

Other than damaging my pride, the car came out without much damage. The mechanics thought I was joking when I described what had happened because, other than a slightly bent license plate, you couldn't tell by just looking at the car. The only damage was some scrapes on the underside of the car and one of the brackets that holds the radiator was damaged (the mechanics fixed it for $15 + labor: total bill was right around $27 as I recall).

And the Beetle is now also code named "Mini-Panzer". Have I said that I seriously LOVE my car? No? Well I do, and they get really good crash test scores, at least that's what I hear. ;)