Totaling the Prius

The Blazer

I bought a Toyota Prius in June of 2006 because of a loophole.

Virginia had this program where hybrid vehicles could get clean special fuel plates. The plates let you drive solo in the HOV lanes. If you’ve ever commuted from Richmond to D.C., you know what that’s worth. Ninety miles each way. An hour and fifteen minutes if you do it right. The HOV lane turned a miserable drive into a manageable one.

The catch: the exemption program was ending June 30th. I got the car registered about two weeks before the deadline. Brand new Prius off the lot, plates filed, exemption locked in. Twenty-eight thousand miles in five months. That should tell you how much I was driving.

I was working for a startup called Gratis Internet, based out of D.C. I was the first full-time employee, the main architect and developer behind pretty much everything the company ran on. There’s a whole story there and I’ll tell it soon. This one is about the drive.

The week of Thanksgiving 2006, I’m heading up to the office. Normal commute. I’m coming through the 12th Street Tunnel, which runs under the National Mall. Traffic looks clear. I drop my water bottle. It falls into the center console. I look down for a second to grab it.

I look up and the middle lane has stopped.

I slam the brakes. Can’t stop in time. I plow into the car in front of me. That car hits the car in front of them. Three-car pileup in the tunnel.

The airbags didn’t deploy. The front end crumpled hard. I found out later that the impact broke both motors, the electric and the gas. Car was totaled. Side note: always get gap insurance if you’re financing. I paid about three hundred bucks for gap coverage and it covered roughly eight thousand dollars in negative equity. Best money I ever spent.

The crash didn’t feel that bad in the moment. But I put my hand on top of my head and it came back covered in blood. The top of my skull had hit the visor clip on impact. If you’ve never had a head wound, here’s what nobody tells you: they bleed. A lot. Even from a small cut. Blood is streaming down my head, down the back of my neck, soaking into my shirt. I’m wearing a pink button-down. Was wearing.

People start showing up to help. Someone makes phone calls for me. They call the office first because that’s the simplest call. Imagine being on the other end of that one. The architect behind everything the company runs on just got in a wreck and he’s bleeding from the head. Then they call Erin. She’s working at a hair salon in Richmond at the time. She’s got a client in the chair. She can’t leave until she finishes, and then it’s a ninety-minute drive to D.C. on a good day.

They put me on a backboard in the ambulance. No concussion, no neck injury, no back injury. Just precautionary. But here’s the thing about being strapped to a backboard: all you can see is the ceiling. You know that scene in Trainspotting where Renton sinks into the carpet and then gets carried through the city just staring up? That’s what it was. Surreal. Not scary. Just this strange floating feeling of being transported somewhere you can’t see, watching fluorescent lights slide by overhead. I think about that scene every time.

They take me to George Washington Hospital. Six stitches in the top of my head. Everything checks out. A couple hours later I’m discharged and standing outside in a blood-soaked pink shirt, no coat, November in D.C.

My coat was in the car. The car was in a tow yard somewhere.

I grabbed a cab to the office, which was above the Macy’s at Metro Center. And then a thought occurred to me. I’m at a Macy’s. I need a shirt. So let me go buy a shirt.

I walk in. Blood crusted into my hair. It had dried in this way that honestly looked almost intentional, kind of spiked and reddish, like some aggressive styling product. There was product in my hair, all right. It was my blood.

I’m on the escalator heading to menswear and I start noticing the same guy. Every floor. Every section. I test it. I take an elevator up one floor, come back out. Same guy. That’s when it hits me: store security is tailing the bleeding man wandering around Macy’s.

I walked straight up to him. “Hey man, listen. Don’t worry. I’ve been in a car accident. I’m just looking for a shirt. I’m not going to steal anything.”

“Okay, have a nice day, sir.” And he walked away.

I found a long-sleeve shirt to replace the pink one. Then I had a thought. I need a jacket. My coat is gone. But I already own a coat like that one. Why would I buy the same thing twice? I’m spending the money anyway. What if I get something I don’t already have?

I bought a black felt blazer. Nice one. The kind of thing I’d wanted for a while but never had a reason to go get. Standing in Macy’s with six stitches in my head, blood in my hair, wearing a ruined shirt, and I’m making a deliberate decision to upgrade my wardrobe because the math made sense.

I head upstairs to the office. People are concerned. “Oh my god, are you okay?” I tell them the whole story. I tell them about the security guard. Everyone laughs. I sit down and finish my workday.

Meanwhile, Erin is white-knuckling it up I-95. She’d gotten the call hours ago. Someone she’d never spoken to told her that her fiancée had been in a car accident and was bleeding from the head. She finished her client, handed off her chair, and drove ninety minutes to D.C. not knowing how bad it really was. I’d talked to her after the hospital and told her I was fine, but “I’m fine” from the guy who just got stitches in his skull doesn’t land the same way.

She walks into the office. I’m standing in the hallway talking to someone, wearing my new shirt and the blazer. Hair still has the blood in it but honestly it just looks like product. She stops.

“What the hell? You look better now than when you left the house.“

We both cracked up. She’d been panicking for three hours and the guy she came to rescue looked like he’d gone shopping. Which he had.

The next day I learned something about car accidents that nobody warns you about. The whiplash doesn’t hit until day two. I had a friend drive me back to D.C. to get my things out of the car, and every stop, every turn, every slight jerk of the vehicle sent a wave of pain through my neck that I hadn’t felt at all the day before. The body keeps its own schedule. It processes the impact when it’s ready, not when you are.

That’s actually the whole story in one sentence. My brain was already three moves ahead while my body was still on move one.

I didn’t just cope with crashing my car on the way to work. I optimized the recovery in real time. The HOV hack that put me in that tunnel in the first place was the same instinct that put me in Macy’s evaluating blazers instead of sitting on a bench feeling sorry for myself. It’s not a mode I turn on. It’s the mode that’s always on. I see the gap, I see the branches, I calculate which path gets me something better than where I started. Sometimes that makes simple things unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes it buys you a blazer you’ve wanted for years while you’re bleeding from the head.

Look at whatever problem you’re sitting with right now. Not the pain of it. The options inside it. There’s always a move. There’s always a branch that gets you somewhere better than just back to where you were. You’re already spending the cost. You might as well upgrade.

Why replace your coat when you can get a blazer?

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.