Hit

Have you ever worked a job that entailed listening to customer's excuses, if not lies?

"I put the check in the mail the day before yesterday, it should arrive any moment."

"I can't come to work today, I'm sick."

"The dog ate my homework."

Now I'm sure cops and car insurance people have heard it all as well:

"That tree wasn't there before."

"The traffic light was green."

How about

"We got hit by a tire"? 

Let me assure you, this one was true.

This is what happened:

In March of 2002, we had spent a couple of days in the Boston area. It was our first trip to the U.S. after 9/11. 

We explored the city and Cape Cod, and on our last night we were headed to an Outback Steakhouse, which was located about 20 miles outside the city. 

For us, being Swiss people, driving on the freeway is pretty relaxed, even though the East Coast drivers are bit more aggressive than say, the ones in Southern California. 

Still, we were feeling great, peacefully cruising along. Also we like to listen to the radio stations in the U.S. You pick a genre you like, and they will play all your favourite songs. Music from the 60s, soft rock, blues, country, contemporary, you name it.  

Why do I mention this? 

In Switzerland we have less than 10 millions inhabitants living on 41,000 square km, that converts to 15,800 square miles, of which less than 8% are actually populated. We're also divided into three cultural / language areas: Swiss German, French and Italian. 

Meaning we're too small to give each group their own radio station by genre. 

Our radio stations are locally oriented, talking about what's going on within a radius of maybe 50km, that's some 30 miles. Since they serve an entire region, they have to play a bit of everything to please every focus group. 

Anyway, we were on our way to a delicious dinner, and we were most probably listening to nice music, when out of nowhere a tire came bouncing at us, hitting our left front. The tire bounced off us and hit several vehicles driving behind us. 

It all happened very fast, and we didn't know what to do. 

Should we continue? Should we stop on the hard shoulder? Call the police?

Since nobody else behind us stopped, we nervously kept driving. The front light still worked, so we thought it was OK. We were going to arrive at the restaurant in about five minutes. 

In the parking lot we inspected the damage. The headlight glass was shattered, and the sheet metal in this area was somewhat dented and had rubber marks, but all in all it didn't look that bad.

We felt relieved. It was the first time anything happened to a rental car of ours. 

Little did we know that there were other incidents headed our way in the upcoming years ;-) 

The picture below is one example.

For some reason I can still recall the names of the other parties involved:

• Hubby hit April in Santa Cruz, CA, the cop who took care of us, was called Gwendolyn,
• Kenny crashed into us in New Orleans, LA, 
• We literally bumped into Freddy in Dallas, TX. 

So at least we got to know these people, whereas the tire remained anonymous. 

We enjoyed our dinner, all while guessing how this might have happened. How can a tire simply detach from a car on the freeway?

The next day we packed up our things and headed to the airport with enough time to deal with the rental company. The guy was very casual about it. 

"These things happen, don't worry about it, that's what you pay insurance premiums for. Just fill in this incident report form, and you're free to go."

So you've got customers claiming they were hit by a tire every day?

"Uh, nope."

Have you ever been hit by a tire? Let me know.