Cars and Bad Days at Work
When you drive cars for a living, accidents are almost an inevitability.
As is often painfully obvious, we’re pretty geeky about cars here at Drive Cult. In fact, probably the only thing that even comes close to our level of geekiness about cars, is writing about cars. Between us, we probably have enough car magazines to fill a presidential library.
If you happen to be as geeky as us about such matters then you probably heard last week about Jethro Bovington’s unfortunate incident while out testing the Ferrari FF for CAR Magazine. Long story short, a curb jumped out at Jethro, and he hit it pretty hard, bending two rims in the process. CAR posted a video of the “crash” on their website and it immediately went viral. This was apparently done without Jethro’s knowledge and it reeked of a cheap ploy on the part of CAR to garner page views.
We like Jethro and have a tremendous amount of respect for his talents as a driver and as a journalist. Before working at CAR, he was employed by the now-defunct Drivers Republic, which was the website where we at Drive Cult all came together.
It’s the sort of incident in which those involved can laugh about it later, but at the moment of impact there’s nothing remotely funny about it. I can identify. Up until the beginning of last year I was a valet (to clarify, I was a parking valet, not a car washing valet as is common in the UK), and I did this for nine years.
Over the course of those nine years, I’ve calculated that I parked literally tens of thousands of cars - everything from a Toyota Paseo that I nearly passed out in because exhaust was leaking into the cabin to a NHL hockey player’s Lamborghini Murcielago.
Out of those thousands of cars, I had four accidents (which, yes, I paid for out of pocket). Three of them were extremely minor, but one almost looked like the aftermath of a wreck at the Talladega 500.
Sunday brunches were our busiest shifts of the week at the restaurant I worked at at the time. We were pretty backed up as I was pulling a Volvo V70 wagon around for a customer, but my coworker, who was taking care of incoming traffic at the time, was clearly overwhelmed. As was fairly standard procedure, I put the Volvo in park and hopped out to help clear a lane to get things moving again.
As I was running towards a car to get in and move it, I heard a woman’s voice scream, “OH MY GOD! WHAT IS HE DOING WITH MY CAR!?” I turned around to see the Volvo that I had just vacated hauling ass backwards and immediately realized that I had not left it in park. I left it in reverse. It was too late. I was at least 15 paces from the driverless Volvo which was now on a collision course with a parked Acura RL.
The noise of shattering light lenses and denting sheet metal was sickening. My knees went weak, and I doubled over. Reliving this now, I could almost swear that I felt a physical pain in my gut.
Luckily, the owners of the Volvo were very gracious. They saw what happened and understood that it was an honest mistake on my part. The owner of the Acura was visbly fuming, but she appreciated my honesty. Not a good feeling wrecking someone else’s car(s).
We all have bad days at the office. Jethro received an enormous amount of unwarranted and undeserved flak from accusatory, anonymous commenters from all corners of the internet. I was the lucky one. My bad day wasn’t caught on camera and put up on YouTube.