C/D: Doing the honest thing when you hit a parked car

yeah i leave notes

do it, your soul is worth the couple hundred bucks

agreed.

and the next time anything bad happened to you you'd automatically think "i should have just told him".

Thanks. Seriously, that makes me feel better.

New Jersey just has a way of making you feel like a sucker for doing the right thing sometimes - can't completely explain it.

Once I hit a car on my wait out of work at 11 PM. I was 18. I panicked and drove away. A couple hours later my conscience got to me, so my roomate and I drove back and left a note and I let the night guy know.

It hurt my pocketbook a bit at the time, but it doesn't weigh on me. In retrospect I'm glad I did it.

now the next time something bad happens to you you can think "what the fuck did i do?"

right thing all the way.

conscience is a big fat fucking bitch.

C.

You did the right thing and be proud cuz there should be more like you.

I wrote a note once for just accidentally TAPPING someone's car. It's just a simple matter of "wouldn't you want someone else to do the same in your case?"

You guys are all wimps.

C4 under the gas tank. No one will ever know.

now the next time something bad happens to you you can think "what the fuck did i do?"

-- Jordan, Saturday, December 8, 2007 3:48 AM

something, obviously.

ok here's how i learned my lesson on this. the very first day i ever had a real actual driver's license, my parents let me drive one of the family cars to school. my younger sister (2 yrs younger) rode along. i didn't have a parking pass for the school lot, so i parked in a town lot just a few blocks away. so at the end of the school day, i tracked down my sister, we walked back to the car, got in, i started to back out and skkkrreeeerrreeech i turned too sharply and scraped the driver's door on the white sedan in the next space. my sister looked at me wide-eyed, i looked back at her the same way and made a split-second irrevocably RONG decision and said 'DON'T TELL ANYONE,' then we drove away. when we got home i checked the front of the car and saw just a few specks of paint on the turn signal, figured it was no big deal.

FAST FORWARD ABOUT 5 WEEKS, i'm home in the early evening doing homework or whatever and there's a knock at the front door. my sister comes and tells me there's a POLICEMAN here to see me, then scurries off to her bedroom. i go to the door and this total tv-cop-looking guy (beefy, mustache) asks me my name and then says, "did you hit a car in a parking lot last month?" so i asked him please come in and ran and blurted out to my parents ihitacarlastmonthanddidnttellyoubutnowtheresapolicemanhere. so the cop sits down at the kitchen table, patiently goes over the details of the event with me while my parents watch on kind of bemusedly, and at the end he writes me a ticket for leaving the scene. as he's getting ready to leave my dad asks, out of curiosity, 'how did you even track this down?' the cop shuffles his feet a little and says, 'well, to be honest...your daughter's got a big mouth.' so it turned out my sister did mention it at some point to some friend or other, and that friend told another friend, and that friend's parents OWNED THE CAR! net result was a couple-hundred dollar fine and THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN EXCESS CAR INSURANCE FOR ABOUT 5 YEARS. actual damage to the car in question was somewhere in the 300-400 dollar range. i didn't even get mad at my sister because wtf, it was my stupid fault. and my parents didn't get mad at me, they just made me pay some of the extra insurance.

so YES ALWAYS CONFESS. especially if you're with my sister.

(and no most of my adolescence did not resemble episodes of fresh prince of bel-air)

As I was writing a note to the guy whose side mirror my wife tore off in passing, he came back, so we sat down and exchanged insurance information. The good karma was in that he apparently never pursued a claim of any kind, so our insurance didn't go up at all! (to be honest, though, the only reason I stopped, I think, was that I was afraid of video cameras and witnesses. I'm pretty sure I would have just taken off otherwise. I have the moral fiber of a 3-year-old)

The dude I hit was pretty nice about it and was willing to do either insurance or non-insurance, whichever I prefer. It should be a cheap repair, but I once had someone try to pull an obvious scam on me where I'm guessing the auto-body shop colluded in giving an over-estimate on the cost and intended to share the profits with the dude. So if that happens I have the insurance option, I guess.

you have insurance insurance.

In college I slid on ice in the parking lot of my apt. building and put a fender dent in an Escort that was parked illegally in driveway. I thought, well, that was a very expensive 5 seconds and left a note. Car owner called, was grateful that I left a note, but don't worry...getting a new car next week.

OTOH my car's been whacked countless times, with no notes and this has led me to feel like I should never get a new car. But I would like a side mirror with fangs.

only two kinds of people in the world.
I'm glad this is a board of suckers, that way I feel better about being one myself.

the bonus is that we really do die older, proven by science.

the time I left the note for the minor bump in the parking lot (which left nothing on the car) I was seriously worried that they'd take a baseball bat to their car and wreck it up and say I did it. but they didn't