Peugeot 206 — she is broken

If you read this here, and you feel I should have contacted you personally about these events, keep in mind that phoning a lot of people may not have been high on my priority list.

You may phone me, if you feel so inclined, but it isn’t really necessary. Everyone is well and relatively unharmed. No hospitalisation was necessary, although airbags did deploy.

Angie would seem to be quite accident prone. On Friday night I let her go off on her own again, and on her way back from visiting Jaco, she drove the Peugeot into a lamppost.

Admittedly, this omits some of the details regarding the accident. The details appear to be:

• Angie brakes to avoid abruptly stopped vehicle.
  • Braking will clearly fail to prevent a collision.
• Angie swerves around the stopped vehicle, but overcompensates and mounts the curb in the middle of the dual carriageway that is Beyers Naude.
  • Mounting the curb throws her upward in her seat, causing an impact with the ceiling of the Peugeot she was driving.
  • • Head impacting car ceiling causes mild concussion
• Not really remembering what happens next, Angie takes the car:
  • ploughing through a small billboard
  • smacking into a lamppost
• Hitting the lamppost causes:
  • Airbags to deploy
  • Crumple-zones to crumple
  • Engine block to go away
• Angie regains consciousness, and gets out of the car, unscathed, except for:
  • Cut on her thumb
  • Whiplash
  • Lower-back pain

I’m not certain whether I ever complained about the plastic dipstick these Peugeots come with, and how they tend to break off and fall into the engine block.
The French, although incompetent in designing the simpler parts of the vehicle, do seem to have got the safety features sorted out.

As a result, her physical injuries are practically negligible. Of this I am very thankful .
The assessor seems to believe that the car is likely to be written off — a result of combining the effect of the mileage and the engine damage.
Meditating on impermanence is pretty easy with respect to French cars. I’m thinking that I’d have more trouble applying these handy Buddhist principles if Angie’s impermanence had suddenly become more real that night.

Angie took herself to the doctor who has fitted her out with a neck-brace. Two week sentence. Angie has already started complaining about it. It’s itchy and scratchy, and hot and sticky. I think by the end of the two weeks, it will also be stinky.

At one time I had a bucket-bean dog. Now I have a bucket-angie wife. Perhaps I’ll post a picture, of both so that my loyal readers can make a comparison. I’ll probably need to get permission for that, though.