The Long and Winding Road, with Fender Benders

"Fender bender" emerged as slang, likely in the 1960s, to describe minor car accidents. While it's difficult to pinpoint the exact number of fender benders (minor collisions) in 2023, Amica Insurance estimates that around 1.7 million rear-end collisions occur in the U.S. each year.

Here’s a story about fender bender # 1,700,001. It was early afternoon on a pleasant December day in Atlanta, and I had a deposit to make before I headed home for lunch and a much-anticipated and coveted nap. I was waiting at a red light to turn left into the street near my Wells Fargo branch. I was briefly distracted gathering the papers for my deposit, and my foot slipped off the brake pedal. I realized what had happened when I “love-tapped” the bumper of the Nissan Sentra directly in front of my 2015 Nissan Leaf.

The other car owner and I convened between the two cars to assess the damage. I expressed my apologies, and he replied in Spanish. I heard him say, “No habla inglés”, which, for my readers out there who speak even less Spanish than I do, means “I don’t speak any English.”

I deployed my below-average charades skills to motion him to pull into the BP station so we wouldn’t hold up traffic. Once we pulled into the parking lot, I should have gone inside to see if I could find someone bilingual, but I didn’t think of it at the time. He pulled at the spot on his bumper, showed me how loose it was, and deluged me with a torrent of animated Spanish.

Bumpers aren’t what they used to be. I’ve made poorly constructed craft projects with my kids in their respective Sunday school classes that could absorb more impact than this Nissan Sentra bumper. He continued speaking in rapid fire. My high school Spanish (and one year repeated during my freshman year of college because of my poor aptitude for foreign languages), which got us through our family trip to Costa Rica (i.e., “hello”, “goodbye”, “thank you”, “please”, and “bathroom”), would not be be enough to resolve this situation.

This is when I remembered Google Translate. If I’d been better prepared (who prepares to get into a fender bender with someone who doesn’t speak English?), we would have been able to converse in real time. So we just typed what we wanted to say into my phone and handed it back and forth. Although this happened in December of 2023, by today’s standards, it was primitive.

He called his friend, who owned a body shop, to get his perspective. His friend said the repair would cost between $400 and $500. I offered to give him my contact info and pay for repair costs, but his skepticism was completely understandable. I then proposed that he go to “my body shop”, which I trusted as much as you can trust a body shop. He thought I owned a body shop, which made me realize our resolution had to be as simple as possible. He also mentioned that he was a taxi driver, so he needed his car to do his job

We started the negotiation via Google Translate and agreed on $300. He asked how I would get the cash. I pointed to the Wells Fargo bank, and he followed me as I drove a few hundred yards to the bank. We walked in together. I withdrew $300 and gave it to him. In all likelihood, he would have his buddy do the repair at a steep discount and pocket the difference. This was his prerogative, as I was clearly at fault.

At the time, this looked like just another fender bender with the added twist of a language barrier. But now I see it was also a privileged white guy negotiating with a twenty-something Hispanic man, an intergenerational and socioeconomic clash. I had hit the gym that morning, but this was a draining moral workout because I pride myself on being a good negotiator. I had also felt obliged to leave my collaborator feeling OK about the interaction.

The reality was that the $300 wouldn’t make a difference in my lifestyle, but for a guy whose favorite store is the Dollar Tree, it would have killed me. I felt like I was in some Kafka-esque/Candid Camera documentary where my character was on trial. This incident shook me up so much that I didn’t tell my wife about it until I wrote this post.

The real story here, which took me a while to understand and several revisions to get to, is about gratitude. I used to keep a gratitude journal, but stopped doing this about the same time I started writing this substack.

Financial security isn’t about exotic vacations, Rolex watches, or five-star restaurants, it’s more about getting into a fender bender and being able to make the incident go away. I had damaged the other guy’s car and potentially impacted his ability to make a living. He went to work while I went home to eat lunch and nap. With that reframing, the gratitude I feel is immense. There’s a difference between writing about gratitude and feeling it in your veins, and for this, I am indeed grateful.