In Reader's Digest, I once read examples of humorous insurance accident reports. The reports themselves weren't humorous. The way they were filled out by customers was.
One person wrote: "The accident happened because I had one eye on the truck in front, one eye on the pedestrian, and the other on the car behind."
When answering the question "Could either driver have done anything to avoid the accident?" the guilty party wrote: "Traveled by bus?"
And still another individual explained, "I knew the dog was possessive about the car, but I would not have asked her to drive it if I had thought there was any risk."
However, the best excuse I've ever heard for bad driving came from my father when I was but a wee lad. I was with him when he was pulled over by a police officer after he ran a stop sign.
"Didn't you see the stop sign back there?" the police officer wanted to know.
"Sure, I saw it," my dad confessed. "The problem is, I didn't see you."
Since my father couldn't talk his way out of the ticket, he decided to do the next best thing and fight it in court. He's a gambler at heart, and he thought the odds were good that the police officer who gave him the ticket wouldn't show up and the ticket would be dismissed. Unfortunately, for my father, the officer showed up, and the judge didn't buy my father's explanation that the police officer was simply mistaken about what he saw.
"I came to a complete stop, your honor," he insisted. "I don't know why the police officer didn't see it."
One thing I know, if you get in a fight in a nightclub, the police are going to believe the bouncer of the club before they'll believe you. Same thing in Traffic Court. The judge will ALWAYS take the word of a law enforcement officer over yours, so my father found himself soon grumbling as he filled out a check to pay for the fine, which, in those days, you could do.
Still, in the end, my father had the last laugh. In the space provided to explain what the check was for, my father wrote: "Donation for the blind."
Raising My Father
RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com
JimDuchene.blogspot.com American Chimpanzee
@JimDuchene
written for Desert Exposure Magazine
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