Truck dent is just another pothole along life's byways

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 18, 2000

Yeah, usually that meant the pressure was so far off that the other team would be getting blisters from running the bases while the home team outfielders got stiff necks from watching the ball go over their heads.

The kind of people who say "the pressure is off" are the same kind who congratulate you when you get the first "ding" on your new car.

Or, as a waggish neighbor said a few years back when I drove my van into a telephone pole, "the pressure's off now."

I didn't feel like the pressure was off the other day when someone apparently backed into my new-used truck in a grocery store parking lot, denting and scraping a rear fender and loosening the bumper.

I felt, just for a minute, like I wished I had actually bought and filled the double-gun rack I had joked about getting with the truck. That's probably a good argument for not having a gun. In fact, this whole paragraph is just for the benefit of Maurice and Bobby, my gun-loving buddies who are convinced that I am personally dedicated to turning the government over to jackbooted thugs and snaggle-toothed criminals.

Shooting someone over dinging a new vehicle isn't proper, not when there are the alternatives of boiling oil or distributing their telephone number to the solicitors trying to sell second mortgages.

I understand the first-ding theory. I'm just not convinced that it's valid. Let's face it, cars aren't going to stay perfect forever. I have friends who drive 10-year-old cars that could pass for brand new, but they are the same friends who press their jeans and who can walk around a folk festival for nine hours in a shirt that is still creased and, for the women and only a few of the men, their makeup flawless.

And some of us, definitely, are harder on vehicles than others. Mine always have that lived-in look within seconds after I drive them off of the lot, and it doesn't take many weeks of driving down narrow tree-lined paths and over washboard limestone roads to make your paint job look like the face of a hooker who said she could quit crack any time she wanted to.

But there is something different about an anonymous dinger. Usually I know whose fault it is because it is, usually, mine. I can get (very) justifiably outraged at myself over things like that, but my shrink said I had to stop beating myself up (especially because it was embarrassing in public when I managed to duck my own punches).

Fury is easy, however, when some lout has just backed into your vehicle and then driven away, either obliviously or sneakily.

I have to give this one credit, though. On an insurance policy with a $500 deductible, he or she managed to do $429 in damage. And I'm not sure enough that I didn't somehow do the damage myself that I could file a claim swearing that someone else did it. Let's face it. It's bad enough to have your insurance agent think you're a careless driver without having him or her also think you are stupid.

Is this much ado about not much?

Probably.

I remember once having an editor wax eloquent over his car being burglarized during a week when I was covering a murder in which the victim was allegedly gang-raped, beaten and then burned to death, and wondering if his priorities were in order.

Here I am 20 years later and roughly the same age in a world torn by civil strife, drought, famine and a presidential election offering choices between what looks a lot to me like a moron and a pathological liar supported by two of the most cynical, manipulative campaigns in decades.

Maybe I can learn to see the ding as a metaphor for life.

I was clobbered. I don't know who did it. I may somehow be responsible. All the alternatives are costly, and I am reasonably sure I will be clobbered again and soon.

Now, if there was only a body shop that we could take the rest of the world to.

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