The slippery slope

The other day when as I was preparing to leave for work, I noticed that it had been pretty stormy and nasty outside. I looked out to check for snow, because the forecast had suggested that it was possible. Luckily it was not snowing, so I took a little extra time to get ready. Twenty minutes later when I made my appearance outside, much to my surprise I discovered that there was a half an inch of hail and sleet on the ground. Normally this is no big deal, but for those of you that don’t know where I live, on one end of my street is a big hill to go up to a main road and on the other end of my street is a steeper hill down. Normally I always go up the hill because it is faster, but on days when it is really slippery, that is not an option. Well, I watched another car try and fight its way up the hill and fail, so I decided to go the other way. Keep it slow and make the first turn and the worst of it is over. I carefully drove down the street, turned on to the hill and then tapped the brakes to slow down a little. When I tapped the brakes it didn’t slow me down but caused the car to start sliding, now not only was I not able to slow down, but steering wasn’t an option either. There are a few feelings in this world that I didn’t ever need to experience and this was one of them. Realizing that I couldn’t do anything and just watching myself, approach the curb where the road turns. It seemed to take forever, but it probably didn’t. BLAM! Contact with the curb, my car was spun slightly to the side and now both wheels on the passenger side were against the curb, and yes I was still sliding. Down the hill I went scraping against the curb, until the steepness of the hill started to level out. At this point I was able to narrowly steer around a garbage can and bring the car to a stop. It would have been funnier to have hit the garbage can and strewn garbage everywhere, but I am glad that I didn’t.

I jumped out into the storm to check the damage. It was still mostly dark and I couldn’t see very much but I knew that the wheel was somewhat bent up. I went back up the hill, to get the pieces of my hubcap and then climbed back into the car. My cell phone then rang, and slightly dazed I answered. It was my boss, who doesn’t live too far away from me. He was asking me if I was crazy enough to be driving to work and that if I hadn’t left I should stay home and wait for a couple of hours before leaving. Sadly I told him part of the story and that I would probably just try and make my way to work, I certainly wasn’t going to try and go back up the hill.

To sum up the rest of the story, I drove the car to work, vibrating very badly the whole way, did a quick inspection of the damage and went in to work. (Where the servers had died from the storm and everyone was waiting for me to fix it.) At lunch I went down and looked at the bent wheel, and decided to put the spare on. It drove much better and later in the day I drove it to the tire place to have them look at it. As it turns out, I got pretty lucky and only had to buy one new wheel and get an alignment. I’m still mad that it happened, but am very happy that it didn’t cost me a thousand dollars to fix. What a day!