Someone scraped my rear bumper on the driver’s side of the car while it was parked at City Hall on Tuesday night. No note, of course, was left on my windshield. That would be way too much to ask now-a-days. No one wants to be responsible for his/her actions when it costs them money out of their own pocket. We know that the tiniest little scratch will cost us an arm and a leg. Even with insurance, automatically we know that our company will red-flag our account and probably the rate will go up at renewal time. Companies do rate policies on incidents whether you are at fault or not.
It is much easier to pretend that, “No, I didn’t hit anyone….or if you did hit someone, say that it was just your imagination…or it was just a little scrape…it won’t cost the victim too much. Chalk it off your radar because you know if you don’t, honesty has a price. It’s sort of like the guy who hits something while driving, justifying in his mind that it was probably a log when it fact it was a human being, not stopping. We read about these losers every day. I went to two Lake Worth body shops and the first estimate was $598.00. They wanted to replace the entire bumper. If they didn’t replace but just repair, it was going to cost me $375.00
Several years back, I was driving east on 6th Avenue South and a car came out of Snowden and hit me broadside on the passenger side of my car, flipping my car around to a 45 degree angle. Luckily the driver had insurance. But when it came time to get my deductible back, the driver’s insurance company said that I was 25% at fault just for being on the road. Their argument: If I had not been driving there in the first place, their insured would not have hit me. Laughably logical? And my company went ahead and withheld 25% of my deductible knowing that it costs way too much to fight it in court, more than the money they are withholding. It is all a sick game. They all do it.
It is easy to justify wrong, go about your business as if it never happened and never think about it again. Unless you have a witness, or the accident is bad enough for a police report, it is unlikely that you will ever be dealing with anyone of integrity. It is the law that forces you to be honest and knowing someone saw you do it. That’s just the way it is. The system is so corrupt when it comes to truth for even the most honest of people or even sometimes your very own insurance company.
