Monday didn’t get off to a great start. Well, it was fine for me actually but my boss had a little accident. She came in looking a little more distressed than normal. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was safe to ask if she was ok, but I did anyway and prepared myself for a scary, duck in my seat response.
“Morning, you OK”
“Don’t want to talk about it.” Alright I thought, that’s fine, clearly she isn’t happy. I’ll just let her be and I’m sure she’ll talk about it when she feels better (she really scares me). So I shut up knowing that she always wants to talk and assumed she would start talking when ready. 2 seconds later…..
“I just crashed my car in”
“What, really?” I asked knowing that she has a teensy tendency to exaggerate things slightly! Normally a comment like this would mean she tripped over it or something.
“So what’s happened, are you hurt, have you totally trashed it, where?”
“Well I was going along and there was an accident in front and I didn’t see the (50 tonne) car in front of me and before I knew it I went straight into the back of him.”
“Oh God, was he alright.”
“Yeah I think so, we just had to rush into the office to get a parking space, I parked next to him.” (Yep, she chose someone who worked for the same company to bump – keep it local!)
“Right, so what’s the damage?” I asked concerned. And I really was concerned because having been in a terrifying road rage dash on the A1 whilst trapped in her car with a colleague, I thought she must have been travelling at lightning speed and the car would be wrecked, and perhaps she has done more damage to herself than first realised. I wanted to keep an eye on her for any strange behaviour, if I could notice any difference that is…
“My beautiful car, it is practically written off, the bonnet is all folded up (then she did these huge arm movements to indicate the extent of the damage), the bumper is all bent, oh Deb it’s a mess”
Well she seemed pretty traumatised and I was really worried about her. The lovely Audi she has treasured and mothered since the day she bought it (in an almost weird way), she seemed devastated so the damage must be awful.
Anyway that was the initial part of it, then of course came the call to her insurance company to log the claim. “Deb I got a speeding fine and points and didn’t tell them, will that matter?” Will that matter… It’s an insurance company that will do everything in their power to avoid paying a claim, especially one of £7k damage just 2 months into the policy! So yes it could matter, there is that big bold sentence at the beginning of all insurance policies that says something along the lines of ‘If you fail to declare any changes to your circumstances, i.e. change of address, motoring convictions etc, it could invalidate any future claim’. Clearly she had missed this part of any standard insurance document and I don’t think I was being particularly helpful at this point. I’m normally quite direct about things!
So once she had spoken to the insurance company and had sorted it all out, things calmed down a bit. A few hours later when she finished flirting over email with the man she nearly killed who worked in the building next door and who called her a ‘lovely lady’ or something like that, she could then reflect on what actually happened and we started talking about it again in the afternoon. Events seemed slightly different then, here is how they sounded:
“Can’t believe I went into the back of someone, I had made the decision to swerve (yep, she used the word ‘swerve’) around the accident up front, I assumed he had made the same decision (yep, ‘assumed’), but he didn’t and then I went into the back of him.”
So I had to ask “what were you actually doing at the point when you crashed? Were you on the phone (God forbid), did you have your head in the glove box looking for lipstick, were you falling asleep to the drone of radio 4, what was going on?”
“I wasn’t doing any of those things, I was just twoddling myself, I don’t know.”
“Sorry, you were whatting yourself? Twoddling, is that….?”
Anyway, that made us laugh for a while, but she never really did give an answer for that and I would really rather not know the answer to it in fact, so moving on.
“What is the damage to the car then, can I see the picture you took?” I asked this because she seemed quite distressed earlier, whilst I know everything she does or says is dramatised, I felt anxious as she seemed really genuine this time. I should have known really.
“Yeah, here look at it, my beautiful car, look at the damage.”
“Sorry [pause, looking intently at the picture], what damage, what am I looking at?”
“The bonnet, look at it, it’s totally crumpled.”
“No I’m sorry, you said it was like this (then I reminded her of the arm movements she demonstrated earlier), it barely has a little gap at the front, what’s wrong with you?”
“What, how can you not see it, it’s awful?”
Well OK, I was missing something here. Then it came to light that she thinks she may have banged her head without knowing it (think that happened years ago mate) and that now she has whiplash or something. I doubt she got it from the car crash, but if she says she has whiplash, she has whiplash, where she got it from is her business quite frankly.
So this drama has been continuing all week and now she is starting to get back to her normal self. I think it is worth highlighting though that the use of the words above describing the real accident such as ‘swerve’, ‘assume’ and ‘twoddling’ should be completely left out of the insurance claim write up. Please at least listen to me now, for once!
