Actually, come to think of it, I bet you use this word more than I do.
I once had my car insured by Progressive, years and years ago, but they dropped me for no good reason. Something about being a kid with a '67 Firebird and living in a ghetto I think. Not sure they knew about my German Shepherd/Coyote or my Malamute/Wolf sidekicks. . . .
Some years later, I insured my cars with Progressive again, but my wife got some speeding tickets. NOBODY EVER GET IN FRONT OF HER, please. I had to change the registrations and address and insure in my name, just to save a thousand dollars every six months or something like that.
Funny thing is, I am a much worse driver, really. But I know it, and compensate for it. My dreamy wandering eyes adoring the landscape are one problem. So I drive at night. My lead foot is another, compounded by my steel-toed boots, so I drive a '93 Nissan that hardly makes 65 tops. Driving in the center lane is another issue. By center lane I mean the one that straddles those double yellow lines. Another is my penchant for sleeping while driving. No kidding, I've woken up several times off the road somehow doing maybe forty, but since I am so familiar with the shoulders I can actually drive safely there. . . . All my vehicles are salvage now, so I don't carry the part of the insurance for the vehicle, whose value is $0 anyway, and since I wear a seat belt and three layers of heavy coats, and wear a helmet, face guard and a neck brace, I'm good. The other night I woke up on the wrong side of the road with a Semi's headlights in my face. He didn't go off the road but I'm not sure his pants were dry. I just swerved back into my lane. Of course, my route is pretty desolate and I hardly ever see another car. Especially in the past several most recent years. There seem to be some vague rumors of gossip about being on that road in the nighttime. Folks just don't do that anymore. Deer and Antelope sometimes come out on the road to see me go by, but in the middle of the night, doing forty, they can dodge me pretty good. Or, if they jump into me it's not enough to dent my radiator. I have this steel bar setup on the front that would do a little better than the regular 5 mph fenders, you know, the plastic ones. I have this new invention I'm patenting soon, it's a thick block of Styrofoam with a body-shaped cutout, including a little visual peekhole that helps focus my wandering attention. It can be shaped on the outside so it conforms to your car seat and contacts solidly to the dash, and doors. My mother-in-law was in a car crash once with her whole family of I think sixteen kids. They were packed in like sardines with no wiggle room. The car rolled 45 times down a boulder-strewn 60-degree hillside for 400 feet, and nobody was injured. When you're packed tight like that your momentum will just match the steel shell of the vehicle, and the steel can't be dented inward because there is equal pressure from the cargo pushing back at every bounce.
When I was a kid, I dreamed of inventing a new car with the frame and shell all titanium. Now I would add a sort of wafer concept to the shell, make it two layers of titanium with a sort of collapsible/reinflaible "inner tube" filled with water, and a few outside pressure vents/fill ports. I've wondered why they don't make air bags that will mount on the fenders and absorb force in a collision, too. Or maybe something like a heavy fluid that can squirt like Old Faithful in a collision, perhaps at escape velocity, re-directing collision impact force to the moon. Inside of that I would have a mesh of that stuff they make bullet-proof vests from, and one of that high-tech insulator used in ski gear. And you know those roll bars OHVs have for doing the 90-degree hills in the extreme rock-climbing challenges? I'd do a system of roll bars making a sort of engineered ball so when I roll my vehicle, it would REALLY ROLL. You can engineer strength enough to make a vehicle act like a billiard ball in a collision, you know, and if the passengers are inside one of my Styrofoam blocks, it could be pretty fun.
Tell me, just how progressive is Progressive?
Well, anyway, this is a sort of online ad for a "consulting" job as a crash dummy. Send your job offers to my PM box here.
I hear the new computing science is going to be applied to cars. . . .. giving them literally hundreds of sensors that can "see" deer in the dark, and even keep you in your lane, at whatever speed you punch into the computer, and avoid imminent collisions by vaporizing oncoming vehicles with Helium lasers. As old as I am, I see a great future of still having my license when I'm 145 years old.
