Signs + Cars + Me = Disaster!

I'm not a terrible driver...really. It just seems lately that I don't get along too well with signs. Not only do I plow them over, but I do it in the presence of those who will never let me forget. My first encounter was last winter in the hooptie while taking a co-worker of mine with me to work. We were having an early winter and the snow was coming down hard. So here I am, driving ever so carefully because of the snow, ice, and a last minute passenger.

I get to my parking lot at work safely, without slipping and sliding. My passenger's nerves seem to ease as we were turning into the parking lot. Now you have to picture the lot: It's a smallish lot surrounded by three buildings, it is completely flat, and everything is stark white from snow and ice. It's snowing buckets and anything that would be silver and white would be camouflaging by falling snow. This would include the two visitor signs that, by the way, did not have any reflective material. I've traversed this parking lot for the past two years, so I had an idea where these now camouflaged signs were. What made this slightly more difficult was that everyone was parking all over the lot. Apparently, when you can't see lines, you tend to make your own.

So here I am judging the orientation of the cars, and I'm driving up to my turn. I'm looking at a car that I can tell is close to where the visitors area is and sure enough, I see one of the signs. But I didn't see the other, and I thought the car was parked in front of the inside visitor's spot. So I make my turn. Needless to say, I found the sign. It caught the side of my quarter panel and my side mirror. Since I was driving a hooptie, I knew there was nothing taking out my mirror. So the sign not only falls flat, but complete breaks off the pole. My passenger screamed to the top of her lungs, then started laughing her butt off. The news spread so fast that I had everyone at work stop by my office to laugh at me and make jokes. Needless to say, I have yet to live this down. If anything good came out of it, they finally put reflective material on the old sign and the new one they replaced with the one I took out.

Now, fast forward to today. I'm not driving a hooptie, but a practically new Grand Marquis. A big storm is moving in and the dh is wanting me to park the car under a canopy at the station he works at to avoid the hail. So here I am, pulling up to the canopy. My dh and a couple of his buddies are standing outside and watching me pull in. Now, the spot that I'm pulling into has an old door, and an old sign propped up against the wall. I'm pulling in, and while I'm doing this, I'm trying to gauge how far way I am from the door and sign. Now, this is a fairly new car, and I'm thinking I have enough room to pull in a little closer. Wrong! To make a long story short, I bumped into the sign and door, shoving up into the wall. All this done in front of my dh and the buddies. My dh freaks because the car is fairly new, the buddies are rolling on the ground in hysterics. I'm five thousand shades of red.

The car is O.K., and I have already received my first ribbing. When I went back to pick up the car, I was backing out and my dh was waiting in his car behind me to pull out, and one of the buddies who witnessed the incident was in his car behind him. As I was backing out, I can see my dh backing up a little (there was about 20 feet between his car and mine). When I got home, my dh called to tell me that while I was backing up, the buddy behind him called and asked if he needed to back up another 10 feet, because with the day I was having, I'm liable to back into his car. HA!

I'll never live this down.