I had an idea.
*silence...sounds of cats walking on carpet...bags of potatoes falling in neighboring apartment*
Seriously. I know this is highly unorthodox, given that this Blog is dedicated to the proliferation of stupidity and all, but this is a good one, and it has its roots in stupidity. Very, very deep roots.
I'm going to host a Contest of Stupidness, and the subject will be: "Stupid Car Accident Stories". I'm sure that I'm not the only one who's fallen asleep and rolled his car into a ditch, or driven a delivery truck through a bank's drive-thru only to find that the building's overhang was four inches too low, or backed into a tree.
What? Well, why don't you shut up?
Anyway, the rules, stipulations, guidelines, flavors...of this contest will be as follows:
- The Contest starts today, and ends a week from now.
- Entries shall be emailed to: blogofstupid@sbcglobal.net with "Stupid Car Accident Story" as the email's Subject.
- Entries must be Stupid.
- Pictures are welcome, but not required.
- I will judge the stupidity and hilarity of the Entries myself, as I'm most experienced with doing stupid things with my car. I shall forward all of the Entries to my cohorts here at Blog of Stupid for their input, however. Keep this in mind, as this means that three people will be laughing at your bonehead maneuver.
- Any Entries submitted after the contests ends will merely be laughed at, and shall not be eligible for the Prize.
- If you're interested in receiving the Prize, please include with your Entry the resolution you'd like your background image to be.
Since this is actually a cheap attempt on my part to grab more traffic for the Blog, the winner of the Contest will also have their Stupid Car Accident Story summarized and posted (with picture, if applicable) right here on the Blog of Stupid, complete with traffic-generating link back to YOUR blog! If you've got one!
To kick things off, here's my own Stupid Car Accident Story.
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I live in an apartment complex where each unit gets its own garage with a spiffy electric opener. The rules state that you must park your car in your garage, and any room left over may be used as storage, but your car has to go in first. This doesn't stop people from filling their garages with busted water heaters, moldy old sofas, lamps, bird cages, piles of shoes, children...whatever...and then filling the parking lot with their stupid cars.
Not that I'm bitter.
That's not the point anyway, doubtlessly stupid as it is. What I did to my car, visible in the picture above, is the direct result of my being stupid. Not only stupid, but stupid in an attempt to be slick! This has the effect of amplifying ambient stupidity to the point where your own mother would laugh at you. Which she did.
The garage doors are operated from the outside by a RF transmitter, which you put in your car and lose under the seats, or by a keyed switch on the side of the door frame. When facing the garage door head-on, this switch is at about shoulder height, on a plane perpendicular to the door. I could reach it if I leaned out my car's window. This is called "foreshadowing," and it is the mark of a good writer.
My father and I split the rent evenly, despite the fact that I have the bigger bedroom. We'd compensated for this by agreeing that he'd get to use the garage. After a couple months, he'd apparently decided that he didn't want to bother with the garage and all its associated blind spots and waiting for the door. So I took it over. Fearing that he'd decide he wanted it back if I said anything to remind him, I never asked him if I could have the RF door opener. So I opened the door by key, and shut it by key. This required that I engage in a laborious procedure wherein I walked to the door, opened it by turning my key, backed my car out, then got out and closed the door. Pain.
My solution? Leave the key in the switch while I backed the car out. This way I could reach out my window, turn the key and start the door on its downward journey, and then yank my keys out and reverse quickly the rest of the way out of the garage before the door hit me on the hood. This is more foreshadowing.
One horrible day, I had turned my wheel to the right in order to swing the front end of the car closer to the key switch, and forgot to straighten the wheels when I made my mad backwards dash out of door range. This resulted in the left corner of my car slamming into the edge of the doorway and catching there. I had no time to go forward, no remote opener to halt the door, and the car wouldn't budge in reverse, so the door hit me on the hood. It made a small, almost unnoticeable dent.
Hitting the doorway, on the other hand, ripped my headlight out and scraped up the fender pretty good. Had a local garage fix it up for fifty bucks, and most of the damage was done to my ego. My girlfriend laughed at me a little too. After I got done swearing, I was able to laugh at it myself.
And now you can too!
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Good luck, Brothers in Stupidity! Let the Contest begin! Any questions? Leave a comment!
2 comments:
Oh dear, You must be stupider than you look. lol
I didn't even mention the haywagon, the crane truck and the curb. I've got stories!
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