Damn hell!!
I just dinged my precious car.
My precious shiny car. My precious, black, relatively dent free, shiny car. Sigh.
We were on our way to Atmosphere in the Sabah Foundation Building (or Tun Mustapha Building as it’s know now), for their spectacular cocktails. Note what I said: I said, we were on the way there, not departing. I swear I’m the only person ever to have an accident before they go drinking.
The cylindrical building (in the tiny picture left) has a ramp that joins a circular driveway at about 8 0′clock, if you image the circle as the face of a watch and in the picture the shadow falls on twelve o’clock, then runs around the building and exits down the other ramp which is located at about 4 o’clock. In hindsight, you’re supposed to follow that route and never touch the area between 4 and 8 o’clock.
However, that very area is a wide open space and it has an entrance smack on 6 o’clock, so as it was drizzling, I thought I’d drop off my two passengers at that entrance first before I parked my car down at the bottom. I went up the ramp with enough momentum to carry me to the top and then free-wheeled it to the entrance from 8 o’clock in an arch towards 6 o’clock.
It’s just, the very pretty building’s driveway is lined with tiles. Yup, about the same as you’d find in some kitchens, or perhaps some bathrooms, even living rooms if they weren’t such hideous bathroom blue (unless you like that kind of stuff in your living room of course) – and not outdoor tiles either, nope, house-hold, slippery-when-wet tiles. And it was drizzling, which means it was coated with a thin film of rain; wet rain.
Physics was not on my mind as I made a nice wide arch so as to stop right in front of the exit, parallel so that my passengers could exit with minimum fuss – except, a little into the arch I turned my wheels, but the car didn’t move in the direction I had intended, instead it continued along it’s trajectory on the slippery, wet tiles.
I registered the lack of response only a little at first, and casually responded by turning the steering a little more, yet still with no response. At this point we were very near the entrance. My foot on the break also had little effect, even pushed down to the floor, and there was nothing to do except to watch the entrance approach like an asteroid, as if stuck inside that little triangular space craft used in the old old game Asteroids, where momentum will carry you on and on and on long after you’ve turned and blasted the other way – and our jets were fresh out.
The four entrances of the building are located at 12, 3, 6 and 9 o’clock, with runways about 20m long stretching out from them towards the driveway. There’s a height difference of about a foot or 30cm between the runway surface and the driveway – a big moat of water circumvents the area between the building and the driveway that isn’t occupied by the approximate 10m wide runways – between the moat of water and the driveway is a storm-water drain roughly as wide as a Myvi’s wheel, which runs a border around the outer rim of the moat. Each runway has a few low walls preventing people from falling into the moat and the walls stop at the end of the moat, whilst the runway covers the storm-water drains to join the driveway direct.
So in slow-motion my car floated towards the runway, the moat and the low wall. Mark, my shot-gun passenger, held on and watch, deer-caught-in-headlights like, whilst Phyllis, my back seat passenger, clenched the stuffed toy monkey that was on the back-seat (another story all together) and I think she said “watch out” a few times. Me? I had my foot on the brake, the steering wheel straightened out and the hand-brake almost at shoulder height and images in my head of going up the runway, sliding right into the building’s lift foyer and coming to halt inside one of the lifts.
I wasn’t thinking advanced driving techniques, because I never got one of those for my birthday.
This scenario played out over all of about 5 seconds. Our little white, triangular spaceship with its jets fresh out floated forward, mockingly slow. I guess, had there been more time and if this scene didn’t span real time, I could have jumped from the car, ran in-front and stopped it. But I’m not Hiro Nakamura and before I could even undo my seatbelt, our little spaceship had kissed the asteroid. A loud, unpleasant crack-slash-thump pierced the night and at once, the car stopped moving.
“Why did you do that!?” were Mark’s first words, looking at me as if I just went skidding over the slippery tiles on purpose. Phyllis was quiet, hugging the monkey hard to her chest with her head on the headrest of Mark’s seat. I jumped out and expected to see the crumpled front of my car against the obliterated wall lying in pieces, also expecting my car to be half inside the moat if not the storm-water drain.
The images in my head were vastly exaggerated and probably fueled by the imagination left over from having finished Stephen King’s book Cell just last night. What I did see was some mortar from a small tile that had broken in half by some part of the underside of my car, a severely dented fender and a fog light hanging out of it’s socket like the bloody eye of one of the crazy phoners in Stephen King’s book. I gently took they eye and carefully pushed it back in its socket, before I assessed the rest of the damage. Nothing structural I surmounted and hoped.
By this time Julia and John, who were some distance behind us in another car, had caught up and were next to me asking what happened. The wheel of the car was stuck in the storm-water drain, the fender was hanging precariously and the mortar from the tile made it look as if the runway was damaged way more than just the half-a-tile that it was.
I asked John if he could drive stick and after confirming I went to the storm-water drain side of the car, imagining that with my adrenaline rushing I could single handed lift the car from the storm-water drain. The other wheel was on the tiles, but combined with the slippery wet tiles having no traction, the car being a front-wheel drive and only one powered-wheel touching the surface, it couldn’t just reverse without a push. With John behind the wheel, myself, Mark and two guys who had in the meantime joined, we managed to heave the car enough for the other wheel to contact the surface and he reversed.
Additional inspection revealed that the severe dent was dented as such a big bubble, that I could probably pop it out. I tried, but my shaking arm didn’t exert much force, so I saved it. I secured the fog-light properly and drove back down towards the parking lot, minus my passengers with John in tow in the second car. The wheel made a loud, unpleasant scraping sound against the bent fender as I turned right, but I knew it was just the fiber-glass casing. Once parked in the well-lit parking lot, I checked again. I stuck my hand in the gap behind the fender, gave one focussed thump and un-dented the fender. Apart from the scuff marks, it looked undamaged.
I checked under the wheel and saw the inner lining of the fender had come undone and I propped it back into a position, which wouldn’t bother the wheel later and both John and I made it back up the ramp to where the others were waiting. In the meantime the building security, a lone guy, had come out to inspect the damage and to write an incident report. He had asked Julia and Phyllis my name, and when they said Jaco, he had this look on his face of disbelief and said “come on, I need to do this report, I just asked for his name”.
After explaining that that is my name, he seemed satisfied, but later on took my number as well, just in case. The damage to the tiles were not that bad – one was snapped in half and the mess was just mortar which had totally gone brittle against some poor part of my car.
Our drinks were uneventful, but I didn’t enjoy them as much as the last time. Over the span of the next 4 hours we enjoyed a few drinks and and indecent amount of talk about all sorts of sexual topics. Before our first round I did take Julia’s camera down to take pictures of the scene, just in case they bashed up the entire place and said it was me later on. Unlikely, but you never know.
The drive back was slow paced and easy in order to listen for any sounds which might indicate unseen damage. Apart from a noise when we turned, due to a piece of fender still sticking out somewhere , there were none. I dropped off first Mark, who’s leaving on a jet plane tomorrow evening, then Phyllis at her car she had left in town, and lastly the, by now a little tipsy, Julia.
At home I switched on all the lights in my driveway for a proper inspection. At first glance the car only looked like what it is – dirty. Upon closer inspection the scrapes and a deep, but small pinch on the fender is visible – the head-light looked slightly misaligned and the fender sat oddly away from the body, and I immediately suspected structural damage. I popped the hood and a closer inspection revealed the reason for all of the odd alignments of all the elements involved – popped plastic rivets. I re-aligned the holes and saw the elements fall into place – so it’s just a question of re-riveting the missing rivets, then hopefully everything will sit fine again. The car is due for a service, so hopefully they can fix it all.
So yeah, that’s my car’s first self-inflicted ding and scrapes – there are others, of that be sure, but they all mysteriously appeared while I wasn’t near my car, so my car, like my heart, isn’t completely free of battle-scars.
But that’s life in Kota Kinabalu I guess.