Car repairs are expensive, even when it’s not your fault

Last week I was up around 6 a.m., which was quite a bit earlier than my normal dormancy regime calls for, but I was thirsty and wanted a coffee.

It was quite cold and since I had neither cream nor sugar in the pantry, I figured I’d fire up my car and head for the gas station to fetch a cup of Columbian dark. I sauntered out to the car and noticed garbage strewn across my exit path.  In a grumpy stupor, I cocked back my stiff leg and kicked the obstruction out of the way.  

As I walked around the driver’s side of the car, I noticed – and keep in mind that my brain was not functioning at full capacity, given that I still hadn’t had a hot caffeine injection – that the pieces of garbage I had violently discarded in a reflexively irate fashion, were in fact pieces of my car.  

Some ne’er-do-well had either vandalized my car with a sledge hammer or did a real hit-and-run number on it. Although I was recently termed a “snotty brat” and was “warned” via an over-the-top angry phone call by a local resident – in regards to an opinion piece I wrote – that I had “enemies” in town, I’m not an overly self-centered or paranoid person to think that this gentleman would have stooped that low.   

Maybe my car was damaged because I still have my Ontario plates, as a sort of ‘hate crime’ against a migrant easterner.  Or they figured I was just traveling on through Jasper and since I wasn’t a resident didn’t deserve even a note of apology on my windshield.

That all being said, the most likely suspect is some drunkard, too toasted to drive, who decided it was a good idea to get behind the wheel of his/her car.  If this person is a local resident, you should do the decent thing and come forward and offer to pay my $1,000 plus insurance deductible.    

Drunk driving, especially in Jasper, given that you can pretty much walk anywhere or take a cab, is absurd.  Even if it’s cold out, you should be toasty warm from the booze.  Alternatively, the issue or problem in Jasper may in fact be that you can walk everywhere, meaning that everything is a relatively short distance, providing justification to the drunkest of souls that they can drive home since it’s just a short drive.

The big question to ask though is what would this irresponsible maniac have done had it not been a parked car?  What if someone was in the car and they were injured or killed?  Would you just drive off as though nothing happened?  I would hope not.

Just as a police officer – at least on the TV shows that is – has to check his/her firearm when entering a prison, maybe bars should make you check your keys before you begin your night of debauchery. At the end of the evening, if you want to drive home, you have to blow into a breathalyzer. If you blow below the legal limit, you are given your keys and head on your merry way.  I guess this law could be called, “no blow, no go.” 

This kind of policy would also end the nights when one of your friends says, “I don’t feel drunk, so I can drive,” even though they may, if forced to, blow over the legal limit.  

This kind of inconvenience at the end of a night is far less egregious than to someone like myself who now has to fork over a tonne of cash to fix his car, and monumentally less egregious relative to the family that has to bury a loved one killed by a selfish, inconsiderate dumb-ass, with no common sense or decency.