Tuesday, April 12, 2011

How To Look Really Stupid Part 456

From time to time I have explained, often in too much detail, how many varied and interesting ways I have found to injure myself or cost myself money. Here is a new one.

Yesterday I was taking a presentation to a small country church on 'Using technology in worship.' I discovered, quite late on, that they did not even have a screen and so I dug out of the church store the biggest, functioning screen I could find. Most of our church rooms have fixed screens now and so this one hadn't been much used since Overhead Projectors were mothballed. Why did we call them OHPs and not OPs?

As I was loading the screen into my car I heard my intuitive warning bells ring. 'This needs securing or it might be dangerous,' I thought. I secured it and pointed it away from the back of my head as an extra precaution. The screen ended up sitting on the back of the seats but it was pretty safe.

Hardly ever getting enough speed up in town to need to do an emergency stop I felt comfortable. I rarely get out of third gear from my home to the church.

Approaching the first T-junction someone turned right across my path and cut the corner. I stopped. Not in an emergency but quicker than gently.

Now this screen was old but secure. It didn't move. I say that. Most of it didn't. The central adjusting bar looked as if it was fixed by a plastic cap but sadly the locating lugs had long ago gone to that great lughole in the sky and so as it stopped the central bar fired out and I harpooned my windscreen. Little cracks exploded out in several directions and charged for the edge.

Autoglass will have some fun working out how that happened. Well I'm not going to tell them if you're not.

£75 excess. Pay me in beer for the amusing story.

2 comments:

RuthJ said...

Love the 'great lughole in the sky'!

Ray Barnes said...

You couldn't make it up!


Could you?