When time slows down

One of the very large dents. I would have sub­mit­ted this to STomp! but they’re full of pho­tos of cars with dents already.

It’s funny how smooth the roads are these days, just because the IMF and World Bank cir­cus was in town recently.

But that didn’t pre­vent some very large debris from lit­ter­ing the road my brother was dri­ving on, with him suf­fer­ing a bit of shock and his car suf­fer­ing dents the size of, well, very large dents.

As he recalled, every­thing hap­pened in slow motion as he saw a chair — the swivel sort with wheels you’d see in an office — fall off the back of a lorry and break up into two parts as it hit the road. The seat part of the chair hur­tled off safely in slow motion while the wheelie part went under another truck in slow motion, and was slung­shot into the air in slow motion, where it remained sus­pended in slow motion for a few slow motion seconds.

There was a sud­den loud crash­ing noise before my brother realised in slow motion that the wheelie part of the chair had landed on his bon­net and bounced off behind his car and onto the road behind him.

For all the slow-motioness that was going on all around him, he some­how had the pres­ence of mind to give chase to the lorry, which was still in slow motion, or even slower, see­ing as lor­ries gen­er­ally move slower than cars. He got the lorry to pull over and spoke to the dri­ver, who reluc­tantly gave his details and his company’s tele­phone num­ber, where­upon my brother called the com­pany and calmly explained what had transpired.

By this time, nor­mal motion had resumed, and the lorry dri­ver was extremely contrite.

A few nor­mal min­utes later, my brother mulled over what might have been if the wheelie or any other part of the chair hadn’t had that much luck of the bounce and gone through his wind­screen in slow motion instead.

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