A friend got into a fender-bender while waiting to pick me up. She was backing up in the median and a cab driver was busy darting across the median to make a U-Turn (totally illegal, by the way) and slammed into her. She's alright and the car is only a little bit banged up, but it was a pretty stressful thing. When I got down to the street, totally oblivious to what happened, it took me a few seconds to realize that the car that the cab was smashed into was hers, still diagonal in the street, blocking traffic.

What happened next was the kind of expected fun that one expects in a city known for it's love. There was the traffic slow-down, caused, yes, by the cab being half-way into the lane, but I could tell by the amount of people straining their necks as they rode by that there were other reasons for them to slow down. A couple of minutes in, some lady who stopped in her lane to pretty much yell at my friend and the cab driver to get out of the way because she was causing traffic problems, a problem made worse by her stopping in the lane to yell at everyone. I wasn't sure she was being bitchy because she was concerned or just pissed because she couldn't park in that spot of the median. While she was yelling, there were two other things going on. One was a pedestrian who was watching. He started mouthing off towards the woman in the car, but then when she drove off, started mouthing off to my friend. It's always good to criticize someone who just was in an accident. Good way to not add to everyone's stress.

Then there was the bus. A few minutes after I got downstairs, a bus came by and stopped. The driver measured things up and after seeing if she could make it, passed the accident and went on the way (with me guiding her by- yep, I was guiding a bus). A few minutes later, another bus came by. This bus driver also stopped to see if he could make it, but this time, he just stopped and let everyone out. And there he sat, just waiting, cars backing up behind him. I went up to him to try and get traffic moving along (I'm sure with everything going on, knowing that you're causing a major traffic back-up on Valencia isn't going to help) and told him another bus made it. Driver said he didn't care, he still wasn't moving. So I tried again and once again, he said he wasn't going to move. Why? Because, as he said "I'm paid by the hour, it don't matter what I do."

And that's today's big, exciting blog posting...