Eleven days ago my motorcycle suffered considerable damage due to no fault of my own. I was on my way to work, stopped at a traffic light, when some guy in a burgundy car rear-ended me.

The bike jumped forward a foot, then fell over onto the left side. As I crawled out from underneath, the driver got out of his car to see what he’d done. He asked if I was OK, said he was sorry, and helped me pick up the bike.

When I inspected the rear end and realized, that this was not going to be cheap, the man told me he didn’t have insurance (!?). There was a traffic jam forming around us, so I agreed when he suggested that we pull over, onto this parking lot, out of danger, to negotiate how to proceed.

He got in his car – while I realized my clutch lever was bent from the fall, so I couldn’t drive. It took me a minute to bend the lever straight to make it operable again. That was enough time for my opponent to drive away.

I don’t fully remember how I rode to work after that.

After I had filed a police report, called my husband, and contacted my insurance company to start a claim, it dawned on me that I had made at least three mistakes in handling this incident:

• I should have called 9-1-1 immediately
• I should have taken a picture with my cellphone
• I should have wrote down the car’s license plate number

Surprisingly enough, despite all these mistakes, the whole thing went really well after all!

I was just a little sore for a few days; my insurance company handed me a check for the repairs (minus my deductible) within six days; and the repair shop had my bike fixed today. 

You wouldn’t be able to tell that anything ever happened!