Enemy of Man

Oh crap.

Recently, they have repaved my route to work. Actually, repaved is a lie. They did that thing where they lay down an additional layer of blacktop to cover the most egregious holes in the road and leave a foul tar smell in their wake.

Unfortunately, they picked a bad time (namely: summer in Dallas) to do this, and thus the blacktop didn't fully set for a couple of days. Which meant that on this insanely busy section of road, wherever the new blacktop covered a pothole the constant stress of all the cars just magnified every little hole in the street into these huge chasms and quasi-speedbumps that litter every lane of the road.

Which is hell on the already non-existent shocks within the Truck of Malfunction, but not something to get too worked up about.

So yesterday I was driving in to work. It's insanely early, it's a Monday, and I'm doing well just to be staying in one lane before that first cup of coffee. This is further complicated by the fact that it rained the night before and so everything is nice and slick. These are the absolute worst conditions to drive the TOM in, because it's so lightweight that it easily loses traction on roads, usually just following a storm.

I get all the way to the last 200 feet before my building in a virtual fog, just like everyday, without a single issue. Now when you come up to my building, you have to take a very sharp angle from the road to get into our parking garage. This entails coming to a near complete stop in traffic and then hooking around to make the perfect turn, akin to performing major surgery while being pestered by a thousand 7 year-olds. This is inadvisable during rush hour, so the more common practice is to turn off a little early into the edge of the parking lot next door and make the turn at your leisure from there.

So I do this just like usual, only I pull into the lot a touch earlier than normal because traffic is backed up at the light. At the same time that I pull in, there is a man walking to the bus stop just behind me, and a jogger both headed towards me on something of a collision course with the new trajectory of the TOM. I make the appropriate adjustments to drive by them and still make my turn.

Only, as I'm passing them, the TOM hits one of those potholes in the street. And since it was raining heavily the night before...well, you've all seen TV and movies. Drenched, pretty much from head to toe. Both of them. But usually when you see it on TV, it's from the perspective of the drenchee, not the drencher. It's a really bad feeling, knowing that you've made two mortal enemies before 9:00am.

And there's not a lot I could do about it. If I stopped to apologize, I'm pretty sure they would have beaten me up and/or taken my lunch money.

I have officially become an enemy of man.