QOTD: Does Anyone Ever Leave a Note After Hitting a Parked Car?
I’ve lived in urban areas for most of my life. When you do that, your street-parked vehicles will get hit. You walk up to the car and the fender is mashed in or the bumper is bent… and there’s no note left by the perpetrator. In my experience — and I’d say that in my 34 years of driving, I’ve had parked cars hit and damaged enough to notice (some of my cars hid damage very well) at least 25 times. Not once has anyone ever left a note taking responsibility for the damage. I hear that this note-leaving phenomenon has been known to happen, but such a thing falls into the urban-legend category for me. How about you?
Most of my experiences with parked cars getting bent up took place in that car-killing city, San Francisco, where I lived off and on for a few years in the 1990s. Still, the streets of Denver (where I live now) are rough on parked cars; in a six-month period, my wife’s Outback got sideswiped, my ’92 Civic got its left front fender squished, and my ’66 Dodge A100 had its front bumper snagged and bent beyond repair. If you count my Lexus LS400 getting a dented fender while parked at Shadow Government World Headquarters, that’s four of my vehicles damaged while parked in 2015, and no notes left.
So, have you ever left a note on a car that you hit? Have you ever received such a note?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Oh, yes, a note was left but the person refused to pay for the damages even after leaving a note stating they would. A dented door is not a $20 repair, especially when the dent is more then 4 inches across. And this was a PHD medical type. So in the end what is the difference? I am talking about you David and Rebecca Jobe.
My wife's car was hit while parked in an upscale Seattle shopping center's garage. The woman who backed into it left a note apologizing and giving her number. I called her and she was a real person. I got a quote for repair from a body shop and then she elected to go through her insurance since it warranted a new bumper wrap. I then got it fixed a month later, and besides a snafu caused by her insurance company not communicating with the rental car company it was entirely without hassle, and without cost to me. Cliffs Notes: Some decent people exist, and they apparently shop at nice places in Seattle.