It wasn't a fire drill, it was a real fire. Which meant it was probably workmen fucking something up, and was. We weren't likely to get back in any time soon, said the fire warden from the third floor. He didn't look like he was bluffing. Fire trucks, sirens, alarms, the whole deal. So I decided to fuck off home and come back to collect my stuff later, when I headed out to pick up Monster v1.0 aka Dr No from his grandma's around half five.
Never made it.
State Highway 1 runs north-south through Dunedin on parallel multi-lane one-way streets. South of the CBD and the railway station, a flyover bridge peels off on the perpendicular, crossing the railyards to link up with Portsmouth Drive, which leads around the harbour basin. Keep on it and you'll end up (eventually) at the very tip of Otago Peninsula with albatrosses crapping on your rental car. Albatross crap from 100 yards up can make a decent mess of a rental car.
I wasn't headed to the peninsula, but Portsmouth Drive avoids a lot of traffic lights on Andersons Bay Road. (Yes they have them in Dunedin.) In persistent Spring drizzle I rolled up the on-ramp towards the give-way onto the bridge, glanced at the traffic on the bridge to my right - registering the complete lack thereof - and proceeded.To find a 2004 Holden Vectra CD Hatch giving way to ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING filling my View Ahead.
There isn't much to do in situations like that. As the cars roll to a halt like cue balls in a high school physics demonstration and the world goes very quiet, the realisation hits. You fucked up. Yes, Captain Muppet was giving way to nothing, and no, you can't assume that just because you're capable of manoeuvering a motor vehicle through traffic in a reasonable and timely fashion that all other licence holders can. And yes, you'd better hope that it's an old grandma and not the loose forward trio from the Otago Highlanders that you've just punted halfway to Portsmouth Drive.
Nup. It was... a little bloke from a smash repair place. Youngish, acne'd, apologetic. He signalled for me to wind down the window.
"Erm... we only just fixed this one, too!"
The impact ripped the entire front clip off the Astra, the towbar on the Vectra neatly centre-punching through it into the radiator mounts. It fitted neatly into the back of the wagon. I wondered if GM Europe product planners had ever envisaged designing that functionality into the thing in the first place.
Some fairly hideous noises started grinding out of the engine as we rolled over the bridge and down the off-ramp - the smash repair place was only a few hundred metres from the bridge, wonder how often their jobs duplicate themselves - so I killed the engine on the final approach.So as it turned out, the giving-way-to-nobody specialist at the wheel of the Vectra had been a middle-aged Chinese lady test-driving her car after having been repaired after the LAST rear-ender she'd been in. Hmmm. Details were exchanged, insurance agencies were called, and budget brand bourbon-and-cokes were broken out - it was knock off time by now for the boys out the back. At which point I finally concluded my phone wasn't in my pocket, hadn't been flung around the cabin in the impact, and hadn't dematerialized spontaneously for want of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon.
Nope. It'd probably fallen out on the road when I'd been hauling bits of Astra around the place.
One soggy jog onto the bridge, there was my phone. Neatly deposited in the right-hand wheeltrack of the on-ramp, and considerably more second-hand than it'd been the last I'd seen it. Its fate couldn't have been more obvious even if it'd had Warner Brothers cartoon wheelprints across it. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. Which might explain why there are no informative and yet ironic pictures of munted Astra wagons in this account.
That left just one more call to make on the smash repairer's phone, as the staff cracked Diesels ($18 a dozen from the local bottle-o) and chewed over the day's work. Dr Y phone home.
"Hey babe... do you reckon you could do me a favour? Could you pick up Dr No from grandma's?"
"Yeah, I can probably..."
"...And while you're at it can you come pick me up too?"
Meanwhile, back at the department, they'd let everyone back in.
Barely five minutes after I'd left.
The Doctor is OUT. Of the doghouse. At last.
