Forget Keats, forget Yeats. An unnamed Mazda RX-7 owner has penned the world’s saddest poem. Found in the missed connections section of Austin, Texas’s craigslist, it tells the tale of a new FC owner that found his formerly original-paint ’88 was no longer so mint. Here, read the poem in its entirety and weep:
You parked next to me, on a rainy night at the Moviehouse and Eatery.
My red rx7, newly obtained, rust unstained, sat in a parking spot.
When you pulled in, you overshot.
An old 88, with beautiful factory original paint, sat glistening in the night. I came out to a fright.But you didn’t care, you didn’t think. You hit my car, what a fink.
The front left fender bears a scar, a spot undamaged for 26 years on this car.You left no note, with me or the theatre. My car is left in the state of a beater.
The money and materials are less the matter, but your lack of compassion makes me sadder.
I have been in a state of depression, longing for anything to rid me of this oppression.
That rhyme was lame, I do admit. But that sin I have to commit,
because dear people who read this ad
I want you to know that hitting and running is bad.You hurt not only the car, but the person inside
to know that someone was so cruel to their sweet ride.
You can see the damage done in the original post on craigslist.
via Jalopnik
So sad…
I was side swiped while driving and pushed off the road by a huge
4×4 with a huge trailer in my SA22C and he just kept on driving,
by the time I got started and back on the road he’d gone
and I had a huge scrape all down one side of my car.
Saddest moment of my cars life, even worse than having
the stereo ripped out of it in the middle of the night.
I’m sure most JNC owners have a sad story.
Not just JNC owners.
Wow, that is sad. Poor owner. Poor car.
The week I finally got my car, someone bumped the fender doing a 3-point turn…when it was 10 feet up my driveway.
That is sad, people just dont care.
Such a nice car tho.
Something I think a lot of us can relate to. Most people these days see our cars as nothing but old hunk-of-junks, something we drive because we couldn’t afford something newer.
So painful. Stuff like this is very painful…
That’s why I run a front and rear dash cam on my daily driver. And when the summer rolls around and again I’m driving my ’86 FC, it will get a dash cam as well. But it’s not just on the road that doucebags don’t care about other people’s cars. A roofer working next door dropped a bundle of shingles onto the hatch and rear passenger quarter of my FC, deeply scratching both the hatch glass and paint. At first he was fully insured, then next day he said he never claimed to have insurance, and was suddenly an expert body man offering $150 to repair the car. I’m now in the final stages of getting together the paperwork to sue in small claims court after warning him several times that he is responsible for the $1500 repair cost estimated by the body shop and unless he covered it I’d have no choice but to sue. After tying to get him to pay for over 12 months, with most of our conversations resulting in him walking away in anger saying the car is a “POS”, I am in the final stages (when time allows) of getting together the paperwork for court.
Well that’s annoying. It’s not up to him to decide what’s a “POS” or not. He caused the damage, he should pay. Nothing like adding insult to injury.
The funny thing is that because the car is a little rough in a few places, as it is basically a half-year daily driver and has nearly 300K on the clock, he has decided that the car is a “POS” because an ’86 RX-7 has almost no blue book value. This after him repeatedly saying he has no bodywork experience. OK, I agree that there are rough spots, but the rough spots are in a custom multi-stage metallic crimson candy that I spent an entire summer on 13 years ago and there has been over 150K put on the car since then. Oh, and he doesn’t seem to understand that the car has a brand new interior, fully rebuilt drivetrain and suspension, and puts down over 500HP to the rear wheels from a fully custom high compression bridgeported GT4088R blown 13B.
Let’s say it IS a POS. Repair cost is repair cost.
Let us know how it plays out…
That sucks man 🙁
I chased some guy’s insurer for repair costs for like a year once, finally got the witness statements together and convinced them to accept liability and they stinged on the bill and only gave me 80% of the costs, which I just took on the chin as most body shops had said to call it a financial write off and move on.
After learning a bit more about the law later in life I realised that I should have just filed a small claim after sending two letters within three months and gotten a judgement. Would have been $100 in filing fees and I’d have gotten a result whether it went to trial or not.
I once dented a stranger’s new ’88 Turbo II as it sat parked in front of a 7-11 in a suburb of Los Angeles. My badly installed cheapo Formuling France steering wheel in my Scirocco would sometimes bind and I was cranking the wheel full over to pull into a spot next to a lovely RX7 when it bound. I rubbed a dent into and strip of paint off the quarter panel. I sat in my car for a moment pondering my options: 1. leave unobserved as I was a very desperately broke 19 year old college student or 2. find the owner and admit my guilt. I chose the latter course. I asked a guy in the store if he was the owner and he proudly said yes. I broke the news to him and contrary to my expectations, he was astonished and pleased that I would tell him. A friend of his ran a body shop and I paid a bargain basement rate to have it fixed.
The inverse of this happened a year earlier when a drunk redneck totaled my 240z in Florida, rear ending it at speed with a 70’s Monte Carlo. He had no insurance, naturally, and I didn’t have uninsured motorists, being broke and all. I took him to small claims court and they levied a pitiful $2100 claim against him. He moved to Hawaii to avoid paying but when I discovered he’d moved there (two years later) I sent the court paperwork to the Hawaiian DMV and they revoked his drivers license. A month later I had my $ + interest. As Spike Lee says, Do The Right Thing. Dammit.
That’s the downside of most any classic – or even just a nice vehicle.
One of the advantages of having a big, old U.S.-made beater is the size of the bumpers.
Was at the vet with the hounds, when someone came in and asked who had the station wagon. Me, of course… He’d grazed it with his minivan. I didn’t care, ’cause mine was a rusty, dented beater. When I got home, just for laughs, I took some chrome polish to the bumper and cleaned his van off the corner. The scrape took the factory crease out of his door.
I was standing in line at the Bank when someone walked in asking, “Who owns a blue Camaro? Anyone own a blue Camaro?”. I didn’t think twice about it until a left and found my blue RX7 with a crushed fender. Moral of the story, people as a whole are clueless and you should see if it’s your “Camaro” that they hit.
…and no they didn’t leave a note:(
Camaro? That’s just adding insult to injury.