Amnesty and Rebuke at Caribou Coffee

Wife is spending her last week of unemployment getting ready for the holiday weekend and the upcoming shift in household duties. She's been doing dishes and laundry like a champ lately since she's been home and the place looks amazing for probably the last time in a while once we are both working all the time. Yesterday, she went to the dreaded Target to pick up things we had been running short on for months due to unemployment. Today she stopped at the grocery store and went to get some work shoes since hers are all shot.

During this, she got in a car accident.

Everyone's OK, so no worries.

She was stopping at the Caribou Coffee drive through in Medina for a pick me up and was waiting in the drive through line to order when the car in front of her started reversing. It bumped into her before she could react.

Wife got out, and two young teen girls pop out of the other car. The rider takes over talking, she says her friend literally got her license today, and they were going through the drive through for the first time. The driver was not talking, but clearly just to keep from crying.

Wife: "Well, let's see about any damage!"

They look over the car, my Pontiac Bonneville '99, which is a piece of shit car that got a death sentence 2 years ago and somehow keeps on kicking. Nothing seemed amiss. Wife called me to make sure and let me know she was fine. I said, what the hell, it's a crap car, even if it had a dent, no biggie, we're just driving it to death at this point. No need to do the insurance bull crap.

Wife told the teens that ordinarily they would trade insurance, numbers, etc. But no harm no foul. And then she said probably the best thing a new teen driver could hear: "Well, you got the first accident out of the way already, so now you can quit worrying about it!"

If there is an antagonist in this story, it's the Caribou Coffee employee who came out, not to check that everyone was OK, but to tell wife and the teen to get out of the drive through (though there was no one waiting behind them). So congrats to Caribou for probably making a new driver's first drive through experience with anyone rather crappy. There's one customer with a lot of life ahead of her that won't be coming back anytime soon.