What a horrible way to cap off the weekend.
Ugh. I don’t even want to post a photo of the car crash. I’m too upset. Let me start from Sunday morning. I was happily eating brunch when I got a call that our hosting for Pentel’s Earth Day was pushing through. It was a nice gig, it was for a great cause, and there was a performance by Christian Bautista and a meet-and-greet with Charice Pempengco. I left early enough with time to spare since I live very near Megamall. Then I realized that traffic was going to be hell. I decided to park in that huge outdoor parking between Mega and Podium. I tried to get into the Podium entrance, but I couldn’t wrangle myself into the long line. So I decided I’d go around to the Megamall entrance. As I turned from J. Vargas to Bank Drive, the bus on my right suddenly scraped into the right side of my car. The crunching metal-on-metal sound was sickening to my ears. Since traffic was horrible and moving in centimeters, I made the snap decision to just move forward to not cause any more traffic, knowing fully well that moving the car after an accident, nullifies my chances for a sketch for the police report, weakening my case against the bus.
Luckily, the bus stopped since passengers were getting off and the bus driver had to get the luggage from the bus’ belly. I approached the driver and said: “Ako yung may ari ng kotse na binangga mo.“ To my utter disbelief, the driver goes: “Wala, wala akong nabangga!“ I looked him in the eye and told him in as calm a manner as I could muster (because I wanted to poke his eyes out with my keys): “Wag ganyan. Kung gusto mo ipa-scrape natin yung pintura na nasa bumper mo at yung pintura sa gilid ng kotse ko at tignan natin kung match?“ Eventually he relented and owned up to it. Jerk.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, because it’s painful to re-live it over again, I couldn’t stay to fix it because our event was about to start, and he couldn’t stay because he needed to deliver the rest of his passengers, so the Ortigas security guy just made me write a statement saying the bus hit my car, with all our details, then signed by me, the a-hole driver, the security guy, and the konduktora.
The awful thing about this is that I’m pretty sure that Philtranco will give me the runaround. Imagine me calling them up to say: “Hi, I’m the owner of the car one of your buses crashed into. Who do I talk to regarding you paying me?” I can’t imagine the bosses clamoring to tell me: “Quick, let’s redress the wrongdoing we have inflicted on this innocent victim! Pay him whatever it takes to make it easy on the poor fellow for inconveniencing him with our inept driver!” I don’t think so.
Anyway, my friend was telling me that I don’t have to go on a wild goose chase with the bus company. He said my insurance will chase their insurance, and the royal rumble will have to be between them, sparing me the added stress. I just don’t want that driver to get away scot-free.
This couldn’t have come at a worse time (not that there’s a perfect time to get into a car accident), but there’s a certain chaos I’m trying to maneuver through and this is like the bitter icing on an already unpalatable cake. I’m just trying to convince myself to find solace in what the elders in our family say when there is some sort of material loss: that the accident took the place of something that could’ve been worse. Like for instance, instead of somebody getting sick, the accident took it’s place. I know, it’s probably folk mumbo-jumbo, but if I can find some sort of comfort in trying to make sense of a probably random event, then I’d take it. It’s no big deal, actually, people crash their cars all the time. I’m just not in the best state to be zen about this.
