Happened today at work. We park all our in-service cars on the roof of our building as room if very crampted here in Fort Worth. Hell, just getting my personal car out at the end of the day is an act of Congress!!
Well, I was pulling down a "sold" PDI from the roof to the service drive. I was double blocked by a new F-Pace. The parking spots next to me were open, so I thought, instead of running down and grabbing the keys to the F-Pace, I'll just "Austin Power's" it, back and forth, until I'm free. I start the motion, back and forth a couple times until I have a free lane. I see that I am clear of the F-Pace, so now I look in the mirror to see if I am clear of the awning poles. I see one, start alittle left-hand-down to avoid it when "CRUNCH"... I hit the F-Pace (Customer's car at that). Damage on the F-Pace is, I'd consider, bad. The PDI still has all the transport covers on it, so it wasn't hurt. I immediately told the Service Manager, he snapped pics, then I was rushed to the hospital to pee in a cup. I don't drink or do drugs, so I am not concerned about that at all. I am just concerned about the door that I'm going to have to fix.
Not a happy camper right now. I have never made contact with another car in my life! Guess it was time to pop my crash cherry at some time...
That's the closest to off road the F Pace will ever get, the owner should rallycross it now.
It's a sickening fealing.
I got in a minor fender-bender (specifically, a bumper-denter) in a parking lot with my Corolla not too long after I got it. No real damage to the other guy but a temporary dent and permanent cracked paint on the 'rolla. That'll teach me to reverse tightly around the back of a van and assume nobody parked there since I was walking towards the car.
Since then I've been the victim of a couple other fender benders (well one was a headlight-gouger for the other guy) and a few hit-and-runs. I've crashed into solid objects hidden in bushes offroad a couple times (a reinforced concrete block and a truck axle) and this weekend I landed the Samurai nose-first into the ground when I came off a funbox too fast. Bent a foglight mount doing that, and later in the same run I bent a spring when I hit a shackle on a buried rock.
DukeOfUndersteer wrote:
I immediately told the Service Manager, he snapped pics, then I was rushed to the hospital to pee in a cup. I don't drink or do drugs, so I am not concerned about that at all.
Did you eat any poppyseed bagels by any chance?
In reply to GameboyRMH:
Nope. I've actually been on a new diet of no junk food or sodas. So it's been lots of vegetables, water and coffee. So all they're gonna find is water and RaceTrac coffee and a banana.
I know this feeling, and it sucks. When I was 19 or 20 I worked at a dealer installing mobile electronics. I had just got done putting a start disable device on a new Chevy Spark (or whatever the small car was then) went to go park it in a covered garage, was backing it into place, checked my mirrors, did the excorsist head scan behind and pulled into place, the WHAM! right into a thin metel pole. It must have been perfectly placed out of sight. Nice amount of damage, I couldn't believe I had just done it.
Employer took the insurance deductible out of my paycheck, which was never a part of the contract or any agreement, so I had to threten them with calling the labor board to get them to put it back. Fun times.
Yeah. especially at work.. that stinks.
What's a PDI? Gonna be any money out of your pocket? Got any job interviews lined up?
Basil Exposition wrote:
What's a PDI? Gonna be any money out of your pocket? Got any job interviews lined up?
Pre-Delivery Inspection. Taking a new car and just making sure the air works and systems work and getting State Inspections done. I'm sure I'm gonna pay for it, just haven't gotten to that discussion yet. Job interviews? Well, a local Porsche dealer wants me to come to work for them, as well as a couple local race teams. I'm not sweatin' my job. The Service Manager even said "eh, accidents happen.."
Damn. I worked as a valet back when I was in college... I once scraped the side of a customer's Grand Marquis along a fire hydrant while that customer was standing right there on the sidewalk. Uggh.
1977 - I was working @ a VW dealer... and that dealer still had only their air cooled car lifts (if you don't know, they were designed specifically to hold Type 1 thru type 4) For the "new" cars (Rabbits, Scirrocos, and Dashers) we were told to line up the axle lifts with the cross piece of the swing arm, and then just use a 4' long 2x4 to "help support" the front of the car........
Face Palm..... 2x4 broke... I'm holding the Rabbit on the lift... I ask for help... no one helps... so I let go, walk away, as the Rabbit does a slow half twist as it falls off the lift.......
My first happened not long ago. I managed to crack the bumper cover on my wifes saturn with the hitch on my truck. WalKed in between the truck and car too get in, checked my mirror and backed right into it. Not sure what my brain was doing.
Explaining it too the wife was a Good time.
I had to stop and think for a while about how you could park cars on the roof.
In reply to stuart in mn:
Yea, it is very crampted here. We have a steep incline drive way that goes up to the roof. When it ices over in the winter, all work stops (from what I've been told, it's turned into a bunny hill for techs sliding down on discarded Jaguar engine covers).
i use to wash cars at a toyota dealership in high school and the wash bays were kinda tight to pull the full sized trucks and SUV's. I watched one guy drag the back door and entire bedside down the pole trying to get into the bay with a 4 door tundra. He was paying for that for a while.
First few weeks on a delivery job I backed a big truck into a 60's Mustang. I wanted to keep my job, so I agreed with the guy that I'd pay the damage out of my pocket-- no cops, no telling my boss. Someone convinced him to call the cops after I left. My employer's insurance paid and I kept the job anyway. Only worked there a year, though, as the main thing it taught me was I needed to further my education so I didn't have to do jobs like that any more.
DukeOfUndersteer wrote:
Basil Exposition wrote:
What's a PDI? Gonna be any money out of your pocket? Got any job interviews lined up?
Pre-Delivery Inspection. Taking a new car and just making sure the air works and systems work and getting State Inspections done. I'm sure I'm gonna pay for it, just haven't gotten to that discussion yet. Job interviews? Well, a local Porsche dealer wants me to come to work for them, as well as a couple local race teams. I'm not sweatin' my job. The Service Manager even said "eh, accidents happen.."
I can't imagine why it would cost you anything of pocket. Your employer should have insurance to cover these kind of accidents. Just like my employees don't get charged when they accidently burn up a $1000 door control. Stuff happens, it's the cost of doing business.
If I was your boss, I'd write you up, we would have a discussion about shortcuts and how they can cost more in the long run, and that would be the end of it. If it happened again, then we might have a problem.
I don't know how I made it through 4 years of parking valet in downtown Atlanta without wrecking someone's car. You're constantly rushing into unfamiliar cars with who-knows-what wrong with the mechanicals or visibility, cramming them into tiny spots, almost always at night sometimes in the rain, with other idiot co-workers rushing around you doing the exact same thing.
Surely it's a just matter of time before anyone who works around crowded spaces full of cars to accidentally wreck one.
And yes, it is a kind of sickening feeling. I've torn up a fair amount of sheet metal in my life. Two totaled and $6k in damage to a new van. Even though none of them were my fault, it's still kind of gross to look at the damage.
A buddy of mine had a summer job when he was in college driving a van picking up and dropping off blood and other medical samples. One day he tried to drive into a parking garage and the van had one of those fiberglass caps on the roof for extended height. You know the ones that look like an upside down row boat. Well as you can guess, the van was too tall and the rowboat ended up on the ground in back of the van. Since it was the end of the summer anyway, he called his boss and told him he quit and left the keys with the parking garage attendant.
UPDATE: Well, nothing has been said or brought up to me yet. It's been work as usual. The customer was contacted and understands that accidents happen. I guess we will see Monday or Tuesday if anything is brought up.
I had a car up on a lift at work and lowered it onto a newer Cadillac's drivers side mirror. I payed to replace it, it wasn't cheap. Then the boss hit a cow with it while on a test drive. Insurance paid for that.
That was not a crash, you just bumped into something.
As a semitruck delivery driver I am often directed to perform feats of levitation.
Very often I say NO, as the operator of said vehicle I am the Captain of the ship and therefore responsible for anything that goes bad.
Even (especially) if someone is spotting you get out and look if you are not sure, you don't get a do over.
I get paid by the hour to do it right. They never remember the time saved, perform a trick successfully once and you will be expected to perform it flawlessly every time after. They always remember any messes, their hindsight is 20-10 and you are always wrong.
