Fenda Benda

I had a little fender-bender this weekend. It was about time - I hadn't had one in a while. An Indian dude driving one of those micro-vans got confused at the Passport Round-about. It coulda been my fault; it coulda been his fault. Hard to say. I came around the outside lane towards Bidaa Round about and he was in the right lane at about 20 MPH. I assumed from his position that he was also making the turn, but he decided to continue straight, hit my car; and instead of hitting the brakes, hit the gas; hit a curb, then a pile of bricks, flipped on the side of the van, and back up again. The van is pretty much totalled. He told the officer that after he hit my car, he lost both his brakes and his steering. Mmmmmm... highly unlikely. Anyhow, I don't really care; it doesn't matter whose fault it is in Kuwait; get the accident report and move on. Nobody was hurt (word to The Big Man).

The Kuwaiti police were reeeeeeally polite and spoke English very well (I didn't catch their names - one was a Kandari). Way to go, gentlemen. The emergency line was very professional and the woman who answered the phone followed up to make sure that the police arrived and that I was ok. Wow. Things are a-changin.

There is room for improvement at the police stations, however. When is Kuwait going to change to a computer system? I have good friends who are investigators and it is really difficult for them to write out all the cases in long-hand. They are not allowed to use their own computers - everything has to be done by hand. It just seems so antiquated. How do they archive all of that? It must be terribly time-consuming. It all goes into ledgers and hard copy files. The police stations could use some maintenance also. It must be a hard work environment.

The investigator I spoke to said that there are a LOT of accidents on the round-abouts. I don't get this. Why did they do major major road construction in Kuwait and leave the round-abouts in the plan? Horrible engineering!