Also be forewarned: you're going to be hearing about the accident I saw yesterday for a while. Feel free to change the channel if I bore you.

After I posted yesterday, I took a nap. I was pretty wrung out. I can't imagine what the people felt like who actually tried to help the man in the car. I guess I'm just a pussy. Whatever.

When I got up an hour later, I started tracking the story of the man who hit my building.

The Seattle Times quoted a police spokesperson as saying that the driver went through the green light at the intersection and hit the building and a pole. I wrote and told the reporter that, yeah, he went through the green but he did it on the wrong side of the street and by passing a car in the correct lane about to turn left onto the avenue.

The Post-Intelligencer quoted the same police spokesperson as saying the car hit the utility pole and came to rest against the building. As is evident in my photos, the car was not resting against the building. As is evident in picture #2 above, the car didn't hit the pole (picture #1 shows the surprisingly light damage to the building). I wrote the reporters and told them that the car never hit the pole but hit the building instead.

Here's where my tear gets going.

I don't know how reporters work these days. I know that Miss Significantly Other has a degree in journalism and was taught, all those years ago, to go get the story. Isn't that a reporter's job? To tell us what happened?

Here is a small incident, I suppose, taken against the backdrop of the news of the day (another car sailed off of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, plunged 35 feet and the driver walked away, another accident a few minutes later involved a police car and the officer was injured, a storm with potential ice was coming, etc.).

But here's the thing: None of the reporters looked at that utility pole. If they had, they'd have seen it wasn't damaged. None of the reporters looked at the wreck or the debris very closely, either, or they would have seen the Disabled Person license plate on the sidewalk and asked questions about it.

As far as I know, all the reporters did was ask the police what happened and then printed what they were told. They may have even done that from their desks at their respective places of work. There were a handful of people who saw what happened - including me - but as far as I know, no one was interviewed by the papers.

I realize that the accident was routine for a city of Seattle's size (yeah, even for here). I also realize that it's become "my" accident because I saw it happen, I called 911, I saw the medics trying to keep the driver alive and after, I walked over to where I stood when it happened and saw the shattered shards of plastic that littered the ground and I realized that I hadn't seen them fly at me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But two reporters asked only the cops what happened and wrote two inaccurate, incomplete stories that have yet to be followed up on (the editors' fault).

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. But we're talking about someone's life.

About picture #3 above: I swept up the rest of the accident scene today and came across the charm in the picture. It was on a black lanyard in a puddle of car fluids in the gutter. The lanyard had to go but the charm is fine.

Can anyone identify the (what I'm assuming to be Chinese) characters? I think the top one is "harmony" but don't know what the bottom one is.

I have an email out to the Harborview Medical Center spokesperson mentioned in the stories. If the driver lives, I want to give him back his charm on a new lanyard. I'd like to know what it means, though.