Tales of the Invisible Ben

Now my car can turn invisible?

Another month passes and again, I have been remiss in the blogging. The normal routine of going to the archives, photographing laboratory notebooks, and occasionally interviewing their authors still fails to cross the threshold of excitement necessary to provoke a solid blog post. And while I would love to write extended commentaries on the history department's softball season thus far, almost no one from said department knows that this blog exists and no one outside of it would care about our epic battles against Mechanical Engineering or Plasma Physics.

So given all that, what has provoked me into blogging once more, besides the extra time afforded by a holiday weekend? Why a car accident, of course!

Because as we learned a few years back, nothing makes for a fine blog post like the collision of two moving vehicles, right? OK, almost right. In this case, only one of the vehicles in question was moving. And fortunately for my insurance rates, it wasn't mine.

Here's the story, in a nutshell. I have been scurrying around all summer trying to interview scientists and engineers for my dissertation before they pass away (as one did just a few weeks ago) or I move out of the area (as I will in late August). One of these lives approximately 20 minutes from the archive and agreed to meet with me at his home office on Thursday afternoon. I arrived a few minutes early and seeing cars parked on the right side of a residential street felt little concern about leaving my car there as well. In hindsight, perhaps I should have pulled into the driveway, but this was about as suburban and tranquil as one could get, and again, there were other cars parked down the street on the right side, near the curb. No signs saying anything to the contrary. All in all, a nice, legal parking spot for a midsummer interview.

I walked up the steps to my interview subject's home, rang the doorbell, and was greeted by his wife. After a brief welcome, I clambered up the stairs with my standard bag of graduate student materials--laptop, notebook, voice recorder, hefty collected volume of Electronics magazine from the late 1960s--you know, the usual. We started flipping through the last of these to find an article that my subject had authored and were discussing the magazine's cover artwork when the doorbell rang.

Fortunately, I hadn't started recording the interview at this point.

My interviewee's wife called up the stairs asking if I drove a little red car. I responded to the affirmative. (It is, as you may recall, technically sangria red, but that's neither here nor there.) I foolishly asked, why that might be a concern and noted that I didn't intend to block anybody in their driveway. But apparently it was too late for that. When I got down the stairs, I received a better explanation from the neighbor across the street.

Apparently in her haste, said neighbor had backed her car out of the driveway, pulled it all the way across the street and hit my car which was parked on the other side of the street.

Again: she had backed her car out of the driveway, rolled ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE STREET, and hit my car which she claimed not to have seen.

Now my powers of invisibility are well known. On the frisbee field, you can see right through me if you're not careful. (And let's not even get into my luck with the ladies!) But I've never been able to extend it to a car before, much less when I am not even in the car. I suppose I should count myself lucky that the other driver admitted her mistake and even more lucky that no one was in the car or hurt at the time.

Nevertheless, it put a bit of a damper on the whole interview process. My driver's side door was dented in severely and the driver's side mirror was hanging off by a couple of wires like a seven year old's first loose tooth. We called the police and the officer confirmed that I was legally parked and that it was pretty much entirely the other driver's fault so my insurance should not be affected. I apologized to my interview subject, promised to reschedule once everything had been fixed up, and called my insurance company to figure out where to go to get an appraisal and repairs.

Thankfully, my insurance company was very understanding and my car is now in the shop waiting to be repaired. In the meantime, I'm driving a nice rental car, call it the Benmobile 3.1, with features that my regular car can only dream of: automatic locks and windows, a truck opening remote, and satellite radio. Yes, I'm part of the next wave of electromagnetic communication...at least for the next week.

I do miss my regular car and wish that none of this had happened, but if you have to get into an accident, best to get into a minor one where no one is hurt and you are obviously not at fault. Words to live by.

_______________________

Also, a quick update on the Invisible Ben's autumnal itinerary.
It has now been confirmed that I will be participating in two European conferences this September, one right after the next. The first will be in Brittany (i.e. France) from the 14th to the 18th, and the second will be in London from the 20th through the 22nd. It is also possible that I will take advantage of the time in Europe to visit another former engineer who is working as a professor in Berlin. This means that, as Ann noted in her comment, I will need to brush up on my French somewhat, though thankfully, the conference languages in both cases will be English. Right now, I'm more concerned about making sure my German grammar is up to snuff for the letter I plan to write the aforementioned potential interviewee in Berlin.

More news to come, as events merit.