Today has been another Trouble With Communication Day(TM). I will ask an either/or question and get back “yes.” Or a detailed question and the answer, while related, seems to be answering a different question or is so vague it provides no usable answer and can confuse things even more.

I get a strong feeling that the other person has missed my point, so I try again to explain what I am looking for. The formula is I repeat my question, they repeat their answer. No movement is accomplished on either side. If I am unlucky, I can’t think of another way of stating my question that is any more clear than the original so I am stuck repeating it verbatim. I don’t understand what the other person is missing from my explanation, what they think they are answering, so I don’t know what to add or what to leave out.

I want to jump up and down and wave “I’m over here, stop looking to my right!” I am sure they think they understand and they wonder why I am not getting their point.

I think the problem is with the basic foundation of the question and answer. The shared information we are trying to work from. I am talking oranges, they are talking apples. Twisting the stem off and using a knife to peel it near the surface makes complete sense to them and is completely irrelevant to me. Once peeled, putting your thumbs down the center makes sense to me and is very strange to them.

When we check in with each other to be sure we are talking about the same thing. “Fruit-yes, Round?-yes, Common?-yes. Guess we are talking about the same thing. That means you must be a freak.” Once we figure out that these are apples and oranges we are discussing, everything we each have said makes sense. We now know how to ask for the info we need and how to interpret what the other is talking about. We can distinguish between useful info (grows on trees works for both) and the immaterial info (mostly in Florida/mostly in Washington). Don’t even ask me what happens when someone has a banana.

I don’t know if Mercury being in retrograde really has this affect but on days where this happens a lot, it seems we have lost the ability to remember the name of our fruit and frustrating misunderstandings incur. Using the concept of apples and oranges, you can notice the affect and try to figure out what is the missing premise that is different between you (the names of your fruit) or just agree it seems that you each have different fruit and give up without getting upset at each other.

Well, it happened again. Serenity has been damaged. I have never had a car that has collected this much damage that wasn’t my fault. This is one of the reasons I don’t buy cars new. Many a morning, I count having this car as one of my blessings. I love this car and so it really hurts me when she gets hurt. I wonder if it is worth it.

I was parked by the North Berkeley bart station near the ball field. A group of 20 something guys were playing around in the baseball diamond.

As I was walking up to my car, some of the guys were looking for a lost ball next to the cars. This made me nervous because that means a car could easily been hit. I even checked Serenity over to be sure she was all right. Everything looked fine. I got in, had a moment fussing with the car door because I didn’t get it closed. I put my keys in, started the car, the radio came on, and CRASH!!! A softball hit my windshield. Ouch. Shattered the passenger side.

So many what ifs ran through my head. What if my appointment hadn’t been canceled, I would have been out of there before the ball flew? What if I hadn’t been in the car when it happened, if it happened when I was still in the City? What if I got my door closed when I got in and moved just a little faster? Mostly, none of those matter other than I won’t be parking near that field again.

The guys were nice and very apologetic. One of them is an umpire for a softball league and seems to know how to deal with this. He claims that there is an implied risk accepted by the car owner by parking next to a field and that the repair should be split between the batter and the car owner. Sounds pretty fair. I am so pissed that it happened but I have no problem with the guys involved. I have contact numbers and a recommendation for a glass company that might give me a good price. I will also be calling the glass company my mechanic recommends and as well as asking my mechanic what he knows about this other place. I don’t know if I even bother with my insurance company. I have a $500 deductible and I think a window is along $250-$350. I will find out when I get around to unsticking my head from the sand.

I am also going to be looking into how much it will cost to lower that deductible because the car is just over a year old and already it has collected major damage twice (ok, anything that needs to be fixed instead of just accepted counts as major in my book). I figure this is my car for the next 10 year. I currently pay just over $80 a month and if it isn’t that much more, it would be nice to not live in dread for my poor car.

It is interesting to note that this is the same corner of the car as the last damage. It is as close to the original damage as the windshield can get.

And because I am me, Serenity currently has an appropriate skull and cross bones bandaid on the boo boo. She got it right after we got home.

I am too way damn silly about this car.

Edit: FYI, I was parked on the street right next to a neighborhood baseball diamond next to a park. Bases and home plate and a home run fence. It isn’t a professional one (i.e. ball players get paid) and there is no parking lot but it is one where kids play on teams sponsered by the local pizza joint. Not sure if that was expressed clearly enough.