THE CELLPHONE ACCIDENT

THE CELLPHONE ACCIDENT   September 23, 2011

Last Friday morning I was downtown on Colbourne Street doing some window shopping when I heard an accident outside the store that I was in. I went out to look and saw a late model car up against a light standard with an elderly (he seemed to be at least 100) gentleman sitting very white faced behind the wheel. I went over to him and asked if he was ok and he said he was fine. I looked at the car and saw some damage to the front right bumper where it was sitting against the pole but it seemed very minor (the air bag hadn’t even deployed). A woman was rushing out of the building yelling that she had called 911 and the police were on the way.

            I looked at the man and could see he was still pretty shaken by the whole thing but was at least getting some colour back in his face. I opened the drivers door so he could put his feet out on the ground. I was curious as to what happened and asked him about it, and this is what he told me.

He was just making a slow left turn off of the street and was concentrating on getting into the lot when the “strangest damn thing happened and it scared the s*** out of me. Just as I was turning, my butt started making a gawdawful racket and vibrating. Let me tell you that nearly scared the c*** out of me and now I’m here I am in this mess”. He got out and stood up and we looked at the seat of the car, it wasn’t obvious at first but when he bent down to look closer he saw something tucked into the seat and pulled it out with the strangest look on his face. He was smiling when turned and showed me what was in his hand. Can you guess what he was holding?  A cell phone.  Just an ordinary cell phone. He said with a smile that it belonged to his grand-daughter. It must have fallen from a pocket and become wedged in the seat, just waiting for him to discover it, and somebody must have tried to call her at exactly the wrong moment and now here he was standing around waiting for the police to show up so that he could move on with his life. I saw the police coming into the lot from the street and he said to me that he really was ok and that I didn’t need to wait any more He said that he was actually looking forward to telling the police what happened and expected that everyone would have a chuckle over the whole thing.

As I got into my car I could see that he and the officers all had smiles on and were looking at the phone in his hand. As I drove away I wondered what else, if anything, I might have done here, but all he really needed was a friendly voice and someone to be there until he calmed down. Lastly I wondered what was going to happen when he got home and then told the family (especially the grand-daughter) how his day went.

I agree with the authorities about the dangers of cell phone usage when you’re driving,   but I never ever would have thought of a situation like this. This is just one of those true stories that are definitely to be put into the odd file.