2001-06-05 - 11:50 p.m.

One Careless Moment

I got a piece of sobering news the other day. One of my regular customers at the comic store was killed in an auto accident.

I didn't know him very well, and most of my conversations with him happened when I still had two stores, and my second store closed in 1995.

He was in his mid-to late 20s, and he worked at one of the cookie stores in this area's largest mall. In fact, it seems like he was just leaving work when he got killed.

Sad to say, it seems like his death was mainly his fault. While leaving the mall and making a left turn onto a major highway, he ran a red light and a tractor-trailer hit him broadside, on the driver's side. Even though an ambulance got there only a couple minutes after the accident, and he was still alive, there was little they could do because he had massive internal injuries. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

This story was related to me by the Manager, who got it from an eyewitness: the person who was sitting in the passenger seat when the accident happened. The witness only got off with minor cuts - mainly where the seatbelt dug into him when the impact happened.

The customer, whose name was Ed, had been working at the cookie store for years. He'd probably driven through that intersection in front of the mall hundreds and hundreds of times. Maybe he'd even run that red light before with no ill effects. Probably the fact that he'd seen that intersection so many times made him indifferent to the possible danger, made him treat it casually.

Every day, in our haste and in our carelessness, we make little decisions to cut corners. We forget to put on our seat belt, we leave something on the floor where we can trip over it, or we try to get through an intersection just after the light has turned red. These are little decisions, and we always seem to get away with them... except when we don't. Then, payback is a bitch.

It seems that the punishment for a moment inattention is shockingly high. Talk about cruel and unusual! However the fact is, it's all a matter of statistics. If you do careless and dangerous things, the odds are that eventually you will draw the short straw. SOmetimes you can be just plain unlucky, but there is no reason to push your luck if you don't have to.

Poor Ed didn't have any idea that one careless moment at that stoplight was going to cost him everything. I hope that I can be more mindful, and avoid a negative jackpot like that.