Some drunk idiot kicked my car door yesterday, in front of a police officer. The damage will cost me £200+ to fit.
This is the Fourth time someone has damaged my car for no reason.
1 - 2 weeks after getting my new car in 2004 someone decides to key it.
2 - 3 years later someone keys the other side of my car.
3 - 6 months ago 3 teenagers smash my door mirror in front of me they also do other cars.
4 – Yesterday's incident.
The only good thing is I’m expecting a new light in the post
Doesn't the police officer make the drunk idiot pay it?
And what about the car insurance?
No it goes to court. They will decide and I will not see a penny, he will probably plead poverty.
That's too bad. What make and model car is it?
Honda Jazz, I clean it every 5 weeks, it the cleanest car on my street.
But you have his name, right? There's other ways to get $200 out of him....
Sorry for the bad luck. Worst incident I've had was a stolen stereo out of a Jeep years ago.... Hell, they didn't even have to smash the window....Just unzip the softtop 
Maybe folks are just jealous of your ride 
This is interesting, that car is called Honda Fit in my country :O
And yes, people key it because they are jealous
D'oh! I forgot to ask the most important question regarding this story.....What new torch are you expecting?
Goes with the territory. Major pain but there is basically nothing that can be done about it here.
What most Americans don't realise is that our crime rate is many times theirs. We lock up almost as many people as they do - but it isn't working. (The UK imprisons just about as many people as the rest of the EU put together.) Americans must be nicer people than we are....
I wash my car every decade whether it needs it or not. Since most of my cars expire before a decade is out (I've never owned the same car for a decade.) I don't wash them often. Usually only when some part has rusted off and I need to get around to fixing the rust. It helps to wsh off the crud before trying to deal with the rust. But your average welder will burn through the muck....
I have washed my mother's car (Which I am using just now) this week - my own car is stuck 150 miles away. Could have gone down to get it today but decided not to as Fizz has an elderly bladder and doesn't much care for trains. Neither do I....
Insurance? Last time I got a car vandalised, the repairs were more than the write-off value. So I ignored the damage and kept driving it. It had worse issues anyway - like the twenty minutes it could take to get it into reverse. Do NOT lend a Saab to anyone who doesn't know about their quirks. Especially don't lend one to an extremely strong woman. Which is why it took so long to get it into reverse.
And as has already been said, what's the new light?
My motor is still down south. The snow has mostly gone but the engine still has a major oil leak...
Will have to pick it up before the next heavy snow on Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday. If the neds (Which is what they call chavs in Scotland - except in some bits in the south-west where they call them "schemies") don't get to it first. There are a lot of neds in Lanarkshire. Actually, there are a lot of neds everywhere in the UK.
Neds for those not brought up in Scotland stands for Non-Educated Delinquents. "Scumbags" is an adequate translation. There are other translations, but they are spectacularly obscene so I won't repeat them here.
Sorry to hear that! I hate accidents, and drunken crimes, all too common here as well.
Some states in the USA have "no fault" insurance, which always seemed so unfair to me. If I drive a $500 junker and obviously choose not to pay for the extremely expensive collision damage insurance, a guy can come along in a $40,000 car and destroy my $500 junker, and I get nothing from him. Rather, each insurance company pays for damages to its own insurers, whether they are at fault or no. And if I haven't paid for damage coverage, I'm out of luck, aside from a civil lawsuit which is obviously not worth the trouble for an old junker.
Sorry to hear about your car. I hope he does some long jail time if he cant pay for the damages. I've heard rumors of people walking into ethnic bars, and for a small fee, hiring big angry drunken people to administer lessons in humility to those in need of an attitude adjustment. Not that I'm condoning it, but the 6 x D Maglite is a fantastic teaching aide in assisting others in how to NOT vandalize a persons private property... especially if swung at the students teeth with sufficient enough force to remove them completely from the fat mouth.
Let us know how everything works out... as well as what the cops do to help you.
It's just a car .. poor kid needs time well spent in a controled environment anyway..sadly they seem to forget about your losses and will make sure he pays all their court costs etc ..all because he hurt you .. sure .....makes perfect sense ..
(Sorry for your undeserved loss)
the light the light .. get on with important details
Hehe, well, I don't know about that. ;)
I guess it really depends on where you live. When I was in high school, we never even bothered to lock our cars. I remember one of my buddies who didn't even have a key for the locks on his doors (back then, the ignition, door and trunk keys were often different). Sadly, those days are long-gone unless you happen to live in a very rural area.
And as far as I can tell, the criminal justice system here is very different from, well, the rest of the world. There is some emphasis on rehabilitation but the basic idea is that serious crimes warrant serious punishment and most Europeans would probably consider the average sentences imposed for felonies to be somewhat harsh. Just to give an example, some states have adopted laws based on the 10-20-life principle (carry a gun during a violent felony, and you get an automatic minimum 10 years; fire the gun and you get a 20+ year rent-free 6x8 feet apartment; shoot someone, it's 25 to life, which doesn't take the DP off the table if the victim dies, btw). I seriously doubt that's going to make a hardened criminal think twice before he goes out and holds up a bank, but it is kind of hard to victimize other innocent people when you're spending 20 years behind bars. And many would-be victims do have effective tools to fight back and make a criminal's day very, very unpleasant. That's why home invasions were almost unheard of outside of large cities until a few years ago: if Mr. Scumbag kicks down a little old lady's door, he may very well find himself at the business end of a shotgun.
Having said that, destroying someone's property in front of a police officer would result in a major attitude adjustment around here. Wow. I mean I've seen some stuff in my lifetime but even the dumbest, drunkest lowlife would know better than that.
Here in the 1970's my dad locked his car door and forgot to take out the key, the next day my neighbour asked "Does you dad want his car" and showed me that the key was still in the door.
Gone are days that you can leave your keys in your doors, now you cannot even open the door to anyone.
Tuesday wasn't one of my better days. Went down to collect my motor.
Where are the keys?
No. 1 daughter (Who was at college) had borrowed them for the TiKey light I keep on the ring.
After a search of her bedroom, no keys.
Eventually the keys turned up, but not my F22 () which is somewhere in that house.
Car won't start, the alarm clearly sucks more power than I thought.
Charge the battery, check the oil - add a lot of oil.
Check the water. Add a lot of antifreeze. This ought to have been a warning.
Got about 40 miles but it was overheating horribly and leaking oil from every orifice. And it was -5 so overheating shouldn't have been an issue. And the heater wasn't working - not a lot of fun while parked up at the side of a very busy fast road in -5 temperatures.
It's cylinder head gasket had decided to let go.
3.5 hours later the recovery truck arrives. Give them a lot of money (About a year's budget for lights :( ) and they take me home. 3.5 hours later I get home - just as well the assistant was staying with friends and crushing their children by doing her lapdog impression - she weighs around the same as both kids put together.
Now I need a new engine - or as my thinking is tending, a new car...
Getting up to go to work 3 hours later after having been up for 23.5 hours meant Wednesday wasn't my best day either....
Waaah!!
Ugh. Yikes! Sorry to hear that. Is there public transportation there for when this sort of thing happens?
Not in the middle of the night - the recovery truck arrived at 11pm, the last train that would have been any use to me was about three hours earlier. Buses in winter at night are rare beasts indeed. My original plan was to get the truck to dump me in the nearest city along with the car, till I figured out I'd lose half a day's income and have a hotel bill and rail fare (And those are NOT cheap here) to pay. It was actually cheaper to pay the recovery truck driver to take me and the car home. The car would not have survived the night where it was broken down.
Public transport here is expensive and not very good. The railways are monopolies, and the major bus company is the same shower of not nice people that operate the railways. There are competitors on the major bus routes, but not in the middle of the night in winter. The nearest bus station at this point was about 40km away. It closes at 10pm.