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[personal profile] rickvs
(This is also getting posted in alt.callahans -- I'm interested in similar instructional tales from other people).

So I can put warning signs at the various cliff edges I've nearly toodled off of, I offer the following story about the guy who threatened to kill me.

This was, I believe, shortly after I got married ...around '93 or '94. I was driving my wife's car through a residential area, and got rear-ended by a pickup truck ...so we pulled over and examined the damage. Both of my tail-lights were busted, and the damage to the truck also seemed minimal. Since the truck belonged to his employer, he expressed a strong desire to not report the accident to the insurance company, and we exchanged contact information, with the agreement that I'd call him with a repair estimate and he'd pay me in cash.

Turns out the damage would cost something like a hundred dollars to repair, which the guy agreed to, and we set up a date to meet. The next six weeks were a long string of him telling me he'd drop by on the coming weekend, then no-showing, and telling me he was short on cash for various reasons: he was moving, his wife was sick, et cetera.

(Even now, I don't think he was lying. I believe he was actually short on money for the reasons he kept giving me -- but I would have greatly preferred that he tell me up front: "Look, I won't be able to pay you for a couple of months", rather than put me on the rollercoaster of anticipation that he did). Anyway, I got tired of feeling strung along, so I left a message on his answering machine, basically telling him that if I couldn't get satisfaction from him, perhaps I'd have better luck through his employer's insurance company.

Not sixty seconds after I hung up, my phone rang. It was the guy, and he was pissed. I was, for all intents and purposes, proposing to knock down the wobbly house of cards that his life had recently become, and he wasn't having it. During the course of the call, he got himself worked up enough to tell me, "If you go to my boss, I will kill you! I'll kill you, and I mean it..."

I'm sure he meant it at the time. I was too shocked to be anything but bemused, as I recall. By the end of the conversation, he had calmed down enough to apologize, but Rachal had been watching my face, so when I hung up she asked me what happened. I told her, and she said, "Right. We're going to the cops."

At the police station, I told my story to the lady officer at the counter, giving her all the information I had, including the fool's phone number. I expected her to go over options with me, or at least tell me what she thought I should do -- but the next thing I knew, the lady cop had picked up the phone and dialed the fool. I couldn't hear his end of the conversation, but I could infer it from hers. It sounded like he was denying not only that he'd made any threats, but also that he'd ever been in an accident with me. So we went home, with the understanding that we'd contact the police again if we had any more trouble.

And I made a decision that I might not have made, had I been single. I let it go. My wife and I were about to move to a new place ourselves, and I just wrote off the damages and never gave the fool my new address. There was a nasty little part of me that realized he and I had the power to jack up each other's lives, and that part of me wanted to start the ball rolling because I knew he had it coming. But I didn't, because it wasn't worth it. The other lesson I learned, boys and girls, is Always Report Your Car Accidents!

So, anything similar happen to any of you folks? By "similar" I mean, stories about your bad judgment, so that others might acquire good judgment a bit less painfully...
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