Story Time

I don't know how I always find myself in these predicaments but through the years I have had bad luck with vehicles.

1991 - My first driving disaster. I got my Dad's Grand Prix stuck in the mud in our backyard trying to drive around the house with my friends in the mucky spring. I tried going in reverse with the door open to get unstuck and mud flew up into the car. Bad Bad Bad! Grandpa pulled it out with a tractor and I was only grounded for a month. We'd only had that car for a few months.

1994 - My Mom gave me her old 1985 Chevy Cavalier for my 16th birthday. I drove that beautiful rust bucket for a year without incident except for being a jackass and getting my hazard lights stuck on just seeing if they worked. My friends Mom had to get it off with a screwdriver. This car had holes in it, the turning indicator had been karate chopped off by my little brother so I could barely use that and brights were impossible to use. It had no cruise, no air, no power steering, the passenger seat was broken, it had no handle to pull the door closed and had to open the window a bit to do so, and the horn didn't blow. But gosh I loved that car, it had 186,000+ miles on it when I sold it for $200.
That summer Joe was trying to teach me how to drive a stick in his Pontiac LeMans. We were at the grocery store and I came off the clutch hard, stalled it out and then it proceeded to not move when in gear. I had broken an axle! Fudge! It cost Joe about $900 to fix. Ouch! That's love.


1995 - I had worked my little dime store job for over a year saving about $1500. My Dad matched my money and I bought a little 1989 Ford Escort with less than 100,000 miles. Still no air, but it had cruise and power steering. Cha bang! 4 days after selling over Cavalier I backed into a tree during a school pop can drive quickly getting the nickname Crash or Crash Test Dummy. My Dad thankfully bailed me out after the accident since my savings were drained and fixed the car. That same month I got rear-ended on my way to work but thankfully no damage was done and I ended up spinning out nearly into a ditch on snowy roads, I also hit a bunny right in front of the high school so of course got made fun of for that. One morning my English teacher was going through papers, raises his eyebrows and reads "Crash Osantowski" some friend of mine had erased Dawn on my paper. Dork. The teacher got a kick out of it. The name Crash is very endearing to me. I have many mentions of "crash" or "the tree" in my yearbook autograph page.

After my senior year things got better for me driving wise. Until a fateful morning in 2002 when I was running late for work, I was backing out of our driveway and scraped down the side of our 2000 Grand Am while driving our 1997 Chevy Venture, I knocked the sideview mirror clean off the car. I wish I had taken pictures. In 2004, I ended up totaling this same van getting hit in the rear by two different vehicles in Florida about 20 miles from our destination. What are the odds?

2005 - Coming home from Disney, we drove straight through from 5am to 3am next morning. About 2:30 am, we're almost home and I hit a dang raccoon. It totally cracked up the front of our 2003 Olds Silhouette and had to be fixed. Not soon after I got to close to a pole at the hockey rink and have a nice little blemish on the front of that van which we still own and I wish I had been driving today.

Today, we are taking a trailer to my IL's. I try to back it in, Joe starts hollering woah, woah, woah!! And I hear a big crunch. I jack-knifed it broke my tail-light cover on our 2007 Chevy Uplander by crashing it into the trailer I was towing. I'm just a stupid dumba$$. Joe is used to these crazy things, just rolled his eyes, and very calmly said drive around the *#$(@!) block and pull the $#@!*# van in the driveway. I guess he's used to this Sh!t. I'm such a loser.

Hope you enjoyed my eventful car ride down memory lane. And these were just the major incidents, I've had a few more incidents involving lawnmowers, go-karts, bikes, mailboxes, my old house...oh it's bad. But not a ticket until that darn no turn on red in October. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I think the moral of this story might be I should just drive beater cars. ;)