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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my favorite Halloween candy is anything with Reese’s on the label, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share lessons learned after a car accident.
Today’s Fun Fact:
Happy Halloween everyone! According to Business Insider, here are the 10 most popular Halloween costumes of 2016.
- 10. Dinosaur
- 9. Clown
- 8. Star Wars
- 7. Batman
- 6. Witch
- 5. Wonder Woman
- 4. Pirate
- 3. Superhero
- 2. Joker
- 1. Harley Quinn
- 10. Election Stuff (Trump, Hillary, Ken Bone)
- 9. Creepy Clown
- 8. DJ Khaled
- 7. Stranger Things
- 6. Ryan Lochte
- 5. Suicide Squad
- 4. David Bowie
- 3. Prince
- 2. Pokémon
- 1. Star Wars
And also according to Business Insider, here are some of the most cliché Halloween costumes of 2016.
What I Learned Yesterday
2004 was a rough year for me. In fact, it’s probably the most difficult year I’ve ever faced. It should come as no surprise that it’s also one of the years I can look back on now and realize that it’s one of the biggest learning seasons of my life.
If you’re a long-time listener of this podcast then you probably remember some of the events of that year. Things got rough near the end of January when my boss called me into his office to tell me that he had hired someone to replace me. Just a few weeks earlier, he had reallocated my huge workload and hired someone to work along side me. So when he then called me in to tell me I was being replaced, I was shocked.
Now if you don’t remember that story, you can hear about it in episode 212. If you do remember the story, then you probably also remember that I didn’t actually get fired from the company. Fortunately, instead of firing me, my boss worked with the CEO and Director of Operations to get a position at one of our retail stores.
While I wasn’t really happy about losing my position as a buyer, and I wasn’t really happy about going back to work at the store, I was really happy to still have a job. In addition to still having a job, the company was kind enough to place me at the store nearest to my house. So instead of spending an hour in the car each day, I spent about 30 minutes in the car each day. No complaints here.
My new commute took me to the store that I worked at when I first started with the company. It’s the store where I first Kari Brunson, now Kari Darnell. I spent nearly 5 years at that store starting out as a part-time cashier, and leaving there to move to Lubbock, Texas for the Manager-in-Training program. Nearly five years had now passed since I’d last worked there. I’d trained in Lubbock for a year, managed my own store in Wichita Falls for two years, and spent 18 months at the corporate office as a buyer.
In many ways, this was a demotion. I don’t think I had to take a pay cut, but I had to work weekends and nights, and I had a position lower than I had enjoyed the last time I’d worked at a store. Adding to the challenge was the fact that I knew how to run a store. I was good at it. I’d won awards while doing it before, which is one of the reason’s I’d gotten the corporate job. Now I had to serve under a different store manager. Of course, his ways were not my ways. He made decisions differently that I did. Many of them I agreed with, some of them I did not. However, it wasn’t my place to usurp his authority. It was my place to support him and make sure the store was ran as he wanted it. As long as there were no major policy or ethics violations, I didn’t see a point in rocking the boat.
However, it was no secret that I had managed a store and performed well in that role. All the employees knew it. They may not have known when I first walked in the door, but those who did know spread the word quickly. In fact, it took almost no time at all for employees to start coming to me privately asking me if I’d been sent to eventually replace the store manager.
Unfortunately, the store manager was not liked very well by most of the staff. While I certainly understood their reasons for disliking him, again, I didn’t see anything worthy of him being relieved of his duties. Not to mention the fact that I felt like undermining his authority in order to take over his position was unethical. And on top of that, I didn’t want his job. To be honest, I didn’t know what job I wanted. I was still in shock of having my dream job ripped out from underneath me.
So for the next eight months, I hopped in my 1995 Ford Ranger each day and drove the five miles to the store, did the best I could to support the store, and tried my best to be content until I could figure out what in the world my next move would be.
However, one particular morning sticks out above all the others. I had the morning shift to open the store, which meant that I arrived around 8:30. It started out as a morning like most others. I got up, showered, ironed my clothes, got dressed, and hopped in my Ranger. It was a cool morning and the air was damp. In fact, it was a cloudy, dreary morning with a steady mist and the roads were a bit slick.
The drive to the store also started out like all the others. However, about half a mile from the store, that changed. I was in the left lane heading east. In the right lane beside me was a dark colored minivan heading in the same direction, of course. A tenth of a mile ahead of us was a small road that gave access to a few shops and fast food restaurants. Where that side street met the one on which I was traveling, a sedan was stopped, seemingly waiting for a safe moment to turn onto out street.
If you’ve ever been in an accident, you know how the whole process seems to happen in slow motion, and yet happens so fast there’s no time to react. I saw the sedan lurch forward and then nearly stop. I thought, “Is that guy going to try and put out?” And then it happened. This time it was not a lurch. It was a lunge. He floored the accelerator and darted out in front of me and the minivan. The van, being closest to that side road, was closer to the sedan. But the van was slightly behind me. The driver of the van slammed on her brakes and the sedan barely clipped the front bumper of the van. I too hit my brakes, but it was too late. The sedan t-boned the passenger side of my truck and sent me into a 180 degree spin. I came to rest in the left hand turn lane. Now facing the opposite direction I had been driving, I was able to see the sedan continue his left turn, cross the other two lanes of traffic, hop the curb, and come to rest in the grass.
I made sure my truck was in park and hopped out. Other motorists were getting out of their cars too and I asked one of them if he’d witnessed what had just happened. I wanted to make sure the driver would be held accountable for the damage he’d just caused to my truck. I then made my way over to the sedan, mad at what the driver had just done, but not sure what I’d say.
When I arrived, I found the driver slumped over the steering wheel and passed out cold. I couldn’t believe it. I thought that there was no way the impact had been hard enough to knock him unconscious. So instead of having words with the driver, the other witnesses and myself starting calling for an ambulance and doing what we could to offer aid to him.
Here’s what I learned:
Over the next few weeks the insurance company representing the man in the sedan came out and looked at my truck for damage. But the whole thing was shady. They never even told me they had looked at my truck until the adjuster was already gone. I had to take their word that they’d looked at my truck and accurately assessed the damage. They then drug their feet on payment, and finally refused to pay on the grounds that their client wasn’t liable. The accident occurred when he passed out due to an unknown medical condition. When he passed out, his foot slammed the accelerator, and the rest is history. If I wanted to get reimbursed, I was going to have to hire a lawyer.
Looking back on it now, that wreck kind of symbolizes my life at that time. I was just trucking along minding my own business when suddenly I was blindsided by an event that spun my life around 180 degrees. I barely had time to react. Things happened so fast, I couldn’t do anything to alter the outcome. I was defenseless, the victim of circumstances, and left trying to pick up the pieces.
But I’m an optimist. And there was plenty to be grateful for. First off, all of those involved in the accident, including the driver of the sedan, were unharmed. He was able to get help for his medical condition. The streets were wet that morning. Because the streets were wet, there was less friction between my tires and the pavement. So the energy of the impact had less damage on my truck than it would have otherwise. Lastly, he impacted my truck directly on the rear axle. It only made a modest dent in the front of the fender. It had no lasting affects on the performance of the truck, and I never had to take it in for repairs. So even though I never got compensated for the damage, I wasn’t out any money.
There are a lot of life lessons here. The odds are that each of us will be blindsided at some point in our lives. When it happens, it will likely cause some sort of damage, and it will take us a while to figure out what’s going on. But things do eventually settle down. Each experience, especially the hard times, make us stronger. They help us have the wisdom we need for the next chapter of life, and they help us help others.
So if you’re in the middle of a tailspin right now, don’t lose heart. It may not seem like it now, but things are going to be okay, and you’ll be all the stronger for it. And what may seem like a dreary day, may actually bring you unforeseen protection and blessings.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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