Crumple Zone
Work was terrible today. My brain was complete mush, I couldn't concentrate. So I started playing with kernel 2.6.7-rc3. Power management is broken more than ever before on my laptop. It sucked. My inability to debug it sucked. So I went home.

On my way home, I got a call that my mother had just crashed the car, so I drove over to help. She had rear-ended a car. The damage is mild but significant, with the front frame pushed in about 4 cm in the center, the lights bent in accordingly, and though not easily visible in the photo, the leading edge of the hood is quite a bit more vertical and scraped than before. The hood actually doesn't sit flat on anymore. The bumper is all scratched up. Next to the licence plate, the other vehicle's exhaust pipe punched a nice hole. All damage is structural and body, the vehicle's performance is completely unaffected. The other car suffered a lot more. Though a tough-looking Oldsmobile, it had just had a hitch installed, which is what caused the center-damage on our car. Because the hitch was attached to the frame of the car, it had majorly deformed their rear-end. I felt horrible for these people, but not nearly as bad as my mother. They were an older couple, on a trip from New Brunswick the man explained was 1016 km, with 2 km left to their son's house, where they were to spend the night, before leaving to their other son in Toronto, and catching a flight from there to go travel. They were so close to their destination, too.

The bad part is that this is my car. I was driving my mom's van, having just picked it up from the shop where the A/C was fixed. Here is the twist: I was the cause of the accident. I was driving down the road in the other direction, about a half-hour earlier than expected. My mother turned her head to see if it was actually me, and the rest is history... ironic history.

I made my mom a sticker that reads "I used crumple zones today."