So I'm driving home today, nearly to my daughter's daycare, waiting to turn left in the small town where I live.  The light just turned green and before any cars moved I get completely crashed into by one of those enormous dodge trucks.  I haven't been in a 2-car accident before (I'll have to blog the story of the amazing rollover Festiva some day) so I was a bit stunned but we pulled over to the side of the road.  The guy who hit me was very apologetic, said it was totally his fault (he did completely nail me going 30mph or better while I was at a stop), we called the cops to file the accident report and as soon as the officer showed I up I said "Listen, I need to pick my daughter up from daycare, it's $1/minute if I'm late."  He asked if it was such and such daycare on such and such street and I responded in the affirmative.  He said to go on and he'd get the other guy's statement and meet me at the daycare.  Such is the benefit of living in a very small town I suppose.  I had called my wife, who is a 2nd shift nurse, and she cannot leave work even for a few minutes unless it's the most severe emergency; google "patient abandonment" for fun.  The standards our health care providers are held to is absolutely insane.  When people say doctors and nurses are overpaid I shake my head in utter disbelief.

At any rate, I have some back and neck pain: perhaps from whiplash and perhaps from shoveling snow all morning but I'm getting checked out by my doc tomorrow to make sure nothing is amiss. 

I posted about my AIM6/vista issue, which soon escalated to "your hard drive seems to have gone bad at the exact time you were reinstalling windows" according to Dell and leaving me stranded for 3 days total.  Things like this make me so angry I can't see straight sometimes, I lose a lot of time when I have hardware issues and the person on the other end of the connection who is not particularly fluent in English often does not seem to care too much.  The guy who hit me was so apologetic and forthcoming with his insurance information that I walked away with my car bashed up, back pain, and the prospect of inconvienient car-in-the-shop, but overall far less disturbed than a simple electronic failure had made me.  Principles are important.

The damage is not as bad as I originally thought.  The guy's tank truck was barely scratched.