Tha Docta Bloggeth at 10:30 PM

It may be true that I'm spending a lot of my time writing and podcasting for MMATorch, where I'm having a lot of fun, but you can be sure that I will visit this space when things happen like the events of Monday. But first! Back story.

The setting is lovely Kokomo, Indiana. Dixon Road. July of 2006. I'm driving home from work, as I tend to do on occasion. As I approach the entrance to a neighborhood (the neighborhood where Zimm lives, coincidentally, but he is not a character in this story), I see that there are cars stopping. Cars have a tendency to stop in front of neighborhoods when someone wishes to make a left turn into said group of residences. This was the case as I approached, and as such, I applied my foot to the brake, causing my car to cease its forward progression toward my own abode. Apparently there were cars behind me who either felt that such action was unnecessary, or decided to play chicken with themselves to see if they could hit their brakes really fast and not hit someone in front of them. Whatever the case, there was an automobile about three cars back that made the wrong decision at some point and rear ended the person in front of it. (I say the car made the decision, but you know what I mean.) As it happened, the chain of rear-endings stopped at my bumper, and I was tapped right before I had planned on accelerating away from this situation. I didn't even realize that contact had been made until I looked in my mirror and saw that people were exiting their vehicles. Of course, feeling like I should see if everything was okay, I exited my vehicle as well, and checked things out. As it happened, there wasn't much to check out, but for reasons that escape me at the moment, I stayed until the law arrived.

To make what could be a long story not so long, the officer checked everything out, assigned fault, and checked everyone's information, including mine (though I said I didn't sustain any damage to my car or person and felt the measure unnecessary, and also I wanted to go home.) To my dismay, the insurance information that I provided the officer was out of date, as I had forgotten to put the new information in my glove box when the policy renewed. Luckily (or so I thought at the time), the benevolent officer told me not to worry about it when I explained the situation, and that I did indeed have insurance.

Let's fast-forward now, past my time in Fort Wayne, and up until this past Monday afternoon. I was driving once again, as I tend to do, but this time I was accompanied by my wife and the boys. This would prove to be fortuitous later in the story. We were pulling into the parking lot at Wal-Mart, where I only go for oil changes anymore, because I hate it. But that's beside the point. As we pulled into the parking lot, I looked in my rearview mirror, only to see flashing red and blue lights. A UFO, you would think? The Publisher's Clearinghouse van, coming to give me large sums of money? The Monkeywagon, coming to award me with my long-awaited pet monkey? No. Alas, it was none of these things, but rather an officer of the law, looking to gain my attention and my pulling over. I obliged him, at which time he came to the car and told me that I had a tail light out. And really, why else would one get pulled over while entering a parking lot, other than having disembodied limbs hanging from one's trunk?

And so, as is customary, I provided him with my license and registration. He returned shortly to tell me that my license, which I had thought to be valid up until that point, was actually suspended. Why, you ask? Well, I had the same question. As it turned out, the events of July, 2006 proved more annoying than I realized. For you see, when the original officer mentioned in this story told me not to worry about having proof of expired insurance, what he really meant was that I needed to go to the DMV (called the BMV in Indiana for some reason) and provide proof of current insurance, or my license would be suspended. Unfortunately for me, he chose to communicate this information by telling me not to worry about it. Luckily for me, my wife has a valid license, and as such it was not requisite that my car be towed and I be hauled off to the big house until I could be picked up, basking in the ignominy of having to ride in the back of a police car.

So at least I had avoided that extra annoyance, but an annoyance it still was, and I'm still not pleased about it. Now I have to fax my insurance company a form, which they will fill out, then fax back to the state. Because that's the...easiest way to take care of this? No, that's not it. It's the...way that ensures I'll have no control over whether and when it's finished? That sounds about right. So who knows when I'll have a valid license again? I'm certainly not going to stop driving because of it, while I wait for fools to fax documents. A man's got to work, you know, and I can't have my poor wife drive me to work every day, especially when I often work as early as 5:30 am, and we have two kids that we'd have to haul around at such a ridiculous hour. I'm not too worried about it. The tail light is fixed, and I haven't been pulled over in almost three years for anything else. So the moral of this story? If you're in an accident, leave the scene immediately, regardless of the circumstances. Free advice from Tha Docta.