Yesterday was supposed to be our last doctor’s appointment before the baby is born on the 14th. We went, heard the heartbeat, confirmed a few things, talked about plans, and we were done – a little earlier than expected even. David was home with my mom, so we could chat with the midwife about anything that came up and not be trying to wrangle him at the same time. All finished, we got into my truck and headed to Halo Farms to get milk, and then head home. We went the way I normally would, coming down Route 1 to the Warren St. exit, then head across the Trenton Makes Bridge (I’ve yet to pay a toll on the Route 1 bridge). We were first in line at the light at Bridge Street, with someone on my left and a woman on a bike half in the street on my right; I remember this for two reasons, one being that I hoped she wouldn’t ride out in front of me but would get up onto the sidewalk instead, and second because I got to find out just how nice of a woman she is a few minutes later. Light turned green, I started to move forward.. and the douchebag to my left started trying to race me. He wanted to cut me off, because he wanted to be in my lane (because he didn’t want to turn left and get on Route 1, he wanted the bridge, and figured if he gunned it fast enough he could cut me off and not have to wait in line like I did.) Whatever asshole, wait your turn.. that’s what I was thinking, until he started moving into my lane anyway.
I laid on the horn, which he didn’t seem to give a shit about, and he moved over into me anyway. Nothing too terrible, his taillight busted out my turn signal, both lenses tumbling across the ground. But, instead of stopping right away, he kept going – so I floored it and caught up to him, bellowing loud enough that I think my mother probably heard me screaming PULL THE FUCK OVER NOW, ASSHOLE. After a few rounds of that, he claimed he was going to pull over on the other side of the bridge where there’s room (bullshit, there’s plenty of room here.. see this map to get an idea of where we were, heading to the southwest over the bridge.) So now that Stephanie has this strange feeling the guy isn’t going to oblidge, she starts reciting his information as she’s looking for a piece of paper in her handbag. At the same time, I pull the iPhone off the charger and tell her to call 911 – which was only a problem because she’s not used the phone yet and didn’t know how to unlock it and bring up the keypad :P I show her quickly, and she dials.
We get over the bridge, and douchebag pulls over partially blocking the side road. I pull up right behind him, but Stephanie tells me I should park next to him instead because I’m blocking the road. I grumble a bit, thinking it’s bad enough we left the actual scene (I had no choice if I wanted to get his information) and that accidents inconvenience people who weren’t involved in it too so they can deal. But I end up pulling up next to him anyway. At this point, Stephanie complained that the 911 call was just ringing and nobody was answering, so I took the phone from her. She leaned over to look at the guy, and said she made eye contact with him; that’s when he saw the phone up to my hear, and peeled out taking off from the scene. I bolted from the truck and ran to the guard booth on the PA side of the bridge (not sure why, really – just that there would probably be an officer of some kind in there) but it was empty. Now I’m fucking pissed.
Remembering the phone in my hand, I put it back to my ear and sure enough someone had picked up; so the first thing I gave her was a quick location and the asshole’s license plate number, before I forgot. While I’m doing that, the woman who was on the bike approached me and said, “You’ve got a witness!” I smiled and thanked her, and as I was telling the 911 operator that my wife is 38 weeks pregnant the woman said, “I’ll go give my information to her.” Turns out, she’s an ICU nurse at the hospital we’d just left, so she was assessing Stephanie for signs of shock or need of medical attention.
After this point, everything was pretty much standard. Did we want an ambulance? No, Stephanie doesn’t want to go to any of the hospitals around here where they’d take her, and she feels fine. Are we at the scene? No, asshole drove across the bridge first. Oh, well we can’t send an officer to you then, you’ll have to come in and file a complaint. Great, now where’s the police station? Okay, got the address in Trenton, we’ll head over there shortly. Stephanie called her doctor’s office, and talked to the answering service, to find out if they wanted to see her to make sure everything’s fine. As I’m turning around to head into the city, they called back and said yes; so we called the police back, said we’d be a while before going to the station, and headed to the hospital (where her doctor’s office is anyway). They hooked her to the standard monitors, the doctor on call said she looked fine. But, he had a surgery to do, and wanted us to stay for the hour so he could make sure, and we had no problem with that. When he was done, he came back in and told us to go home – everyone is fine. Somewhere in that I remembered the milk in the back seat of my truck (which had started to leak too) and ended up throwing the whole damned bag out (two half gallons of milk and a half gallon of iced tea). I think I was more pissed off about that now, in part because it’s wasted money that we don’t have, and in part because of a couple arguments we got in earlier in the week about picking it up 😛
So finally we headed to the police station, and after seeing we’re supposed to park a block away (no thanks) I snuck into the back lot at the station and we made our way inside. Found someone to take our information, and he wanted me to pull the truck out front to have a look at it. I did, and he went back in to generate a case number (told us to just wait in the truck, he’d come back out.) Finally we were on our way home, and we opened the door to David still being awake (well past his bed time, but he was happy and playing, and now we didn’t have to go wake him up to give him kisses and hugs and put him back to bed.) Gave my mom the run down (hah!) of what happened and she went on her way home, then we got dinner and tried to unwind.
Why did I write all this out? For one, it might save me from telling people 20 times over, and also I like to get these sorts of things out of my head and down somewhere so I don’t have to keep trying to remember the details. Plus I got to play with creating a custom map in Google Earth, and that’s cool :>