I only brought out the Poop Award once this year. I've had plenty of other candidates to offer up but not everything is bloggable and therefore those will be awarded only in my mind. I am now able to offer up the true Poop Award winner of the year. Lucky me.
One lovely day this past April I managed to kill both Doc's and my cars. Well, I just about killed Doc's car and mine had a nice little scratch on it. Someone hit me in a parking lot that morning. I switched cars with Doc so he could get an estimate on mine. That afternoon I ran in to another car while driving the Doc's car. I swear no one is as lucky as me.
For the record, this was the first time in my 20 years of driving that I had hit another vehicle. There was that one incident with a post about 10 years ago but that's another story and I don't know how it got there.
When I hit the Jerk, I was driving in a lane that was marked for turning and could be used by drivers on either side of the road. Traffic was backed up 1/2 mile and I wanted to turn left at the light. You've all been there and you've all done this. Don't lie.
Cars parted and let this guy through so that he could turn left. I couldn't see him until it was too late. I could see his face and he never looked my way. Just kept looking to the right to see if the other way was clear. I couldn't even swerve because he kept moving in the only direction that I could have swerved.
CRASH.
Jacob announces, "Great. Now we have NO cars."
At the scene everyone is civil. The cop gives me a ticket but not him. I assume this is fair but in the back of my head I'm pissed that he didn't get a ticket for failure to yield since he never checked to make sure the lane was open. Since his car was not very expensive and looked a mess I decided not to push the issue.
A month later, I receive a check to pay for damages to my car from the earlier parking lot incident. Around this same time I receive a letter from Jerk stating that my insurance doesn't want to pay for the full damages to his totaled car and that he will sue me. Turns out he only has liability insurance and not collision.
Have you ever been sued? Receiving a letter like that made me want to throw up. Seriously.
I called my insurance agent and then the company. They told me to do nothing and that I was not 100% responsible for the accident so he couldn't be paid 100% of the damage. While I'm glad that I'm not totally to blame, I tell them to just pay the guy because a law suit will cost more. They tell me that isn't the way this works.
And then the law suit papers arrive. Due to Jerk's lack of ability to spell my name and transcribe my address the papers arrive late. And oh how I wanted to blog this. As many of you know, I needed some extra stress in my life and by now school is starting. With all of the c-r-a-p we have been dealing with here and there and adjustments for Michael's new school I did not need this.
Jerk is offered within $300 of his requested amount and declines. That $300 was to pay for some extra charges that were not actual damage to his car. So now he is just being stupid. The great news here is that I now have someone hiring a lawyer for me through the insurance company and it will cost me nothing. Jerk has pissed off the insurance company and my new attorney so much that they are ready to take this case all the way. And they file a countersuit for damages to the Doc's car, which costs seven times more than his.
Now Jerk finds an attorney for the mess he has created. All for the $300 dollars extra that he wants. This is why your insurance costs so much, by the way. Stupid idiots who sue and spend your money over cases like this.
This whole time I felt bad for the Jerk who was carless. Seriously. But then my lawyer points out that my ticket was BOGUS. Oh yes. That I actually did not actually break any "rules of the road" and Jerk did break a few. For starters - you can not enter in to traffic without a clear view. You must yield to oncoming traffic. Every time, no matter what. There's two right there.
So the cops ticketed me with a false "charge" of driving left of center which technically would mean I'm driving in the lane of oncoming traffic, which I wasn't. If you ask me, I got a ticket for driving a nice car and I paid all $180 of it without questioning it.
I went from feeling pity to just plain angry in a short amount of time.
We did have to go to small claims court just to officially get it moved to a bigger court. With the countersuit filed, the cost of Doc's car damages moved us out of the price range of small claims. Jerk smiled at me smuggly in the courtroom while sitting next to his mom. And don't even get me started about how the brand new judge didn't understand her job. Yikes.
I will cut to the chase here. My insurance company wanted to go after him and I would have made money off of the deal. The lawyer said this would be a no-brainer and we would win because the laws all favored my side quite clearly. But they gave me the option to offer the original payment to Jerk (the original offer before he sued) if I wanted to attempt to settle it.
I asked them to offer it. I saw this whole thing feeding an anger inside of me that I didn't want to consume me. I was also experiencing a little momma drama with Michael's school and I couldn't take much more.
Jerk's lawyer told him to take the money and run, so he did. He clearly didn't have a case. He walked away with $600 less than what he sued over and he was lucky to get it. I was just glad it was over.
But I'm not sure who is the poopiest. I'm fairly certain that the bogus ticketing led the Jerk driver to believe that he had done nothing wrong and had fueled his righteousness. So, does that make it the cop's fault? Or is he just a Jerk for suing over $300 in the first place?
You tell me...
Who is the poopiest?
"Jerk"?
Or Cop?
Voting ends Friday
For the record, my dogs are not allowed on the couch.
