25 mph

Ever thought about how everything (and I mean everything) you do has consequences that you can't even fathom? There's a movie that I love starring Gwynneth Paltrow called "Sliding Doors". Basically, it demonstrates how just one small, innocent action by a total stranger can cause a string of events that eventually becomes life changing for another person. Well, today that happened to us. Luckily there is no real damage and no one was hurt.

The heat in the rental house has been broken, and John was meeting the repairman there this morning. When the repairman did not show up, John called him. The repairman's response was, "our receptionist is not here and I haven't looked at our computers and don't know where I'm supposed to be." As if the complete lack of responsibility that was implied by that statement wasn't enough, we wanted to find a new company to fix the heat because we are working in the house tomorrow and really want the heat to be working before we get there. So John made an appt. with another company for a later time today. On his to go meet the new repairman while exiting off of 385 onto Pleasantburg Drive he was in a small fender-bender. To make a complicated story very short: John was on the exit ramp when a car a couple of lanes over decided it MUST exit right then. That car swerved accross a couple of lanes, causing another car to swerve in front of John, which caused John to hit the other car from behind. The car that caused all the swerving drove away untouched. It was so unavoidable and so completely not John's fault that the ladies John hit told the policeman that it was not his fault. In addition to that, an uninvolved witness turned around and came back to the site of the accident and also told the policeman that the accident was not John's fault. The cop of course had to ticket John for causing the accident since the "phantom car" was not there. He also explained to John how the speed limit on all exit ramps is 25 mph and he shouldn't follow so closely (I guess it didn't matter that there actually was not a car in front of John for him to follow). He kindly explained that John can go to court, and the fine will probably be reduced. There's not a scratch on John's car, but the van he hit has a small dent in the tailgate. So he couldn't have been going that much over 25mph.

If the original heating repair guy had only taken the initiative to show up where he was supposed to be today, John would have been at work at the time of the wreck. So do you think we can get the original heating repair guy to pay for the increase in insurance expense?

So you all now know that the speed limit is 25 mph on all exit ramps, even at the very beginning of them. (Don't try to make sense of that because there is no common sense in it at all. If you slowed down to 25 before you got on the ramp, you'd be stopped by the police for traveling too slow.) - Ashley