Failure to Signal

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Picture this. It was 1990 and I was 17 and still driving my first car. A 1980 powder blue Ford Fiesta I bought for $425. At the time, during the summer months, I worked for our local school district, cleaning classrooms, waxing and buffing the floors and made a whopping $4.25 an hour. That was big money for a 17-year-old back then. Minimum wage was $3.80 at the time and wouldn't see $4.25 until the following year in 1991. They had just opened up Moro Road a week before after being shut down for a few months as they were widening it and repaving it. Before it was just a potholed old country road. It was a faster route to work, and so off I went, making a right at my turn onto Moro off St. James. My Ford Fiesta had a flat dash toward the passenger side, and I had put my coffee cup on there. It was a sealed travel cup. Granted not like the ones we have today, but similar. When I turned onto Moro it slid from left to right, and my first thought was, "That's probably going to fall off there, bust open and spill." So, I reached over and grabbed it and then proceeded to try to stuff it between my driver's seat and the pull lever for the parking brake. It didn't seem like I was on this task for very long, but when I looked up from trying to position the cup, the road was gone and all I saw was field grass. That's when it happened. I felt the left back wheel slip and that was it, I began to roll. In fact, I rolled several times, all the way down into a deep ditch, rolling until the front end caught the bottom of the ditch right where it was heading up another hill on the other side, and flung me up and then down where I finally stopped in a position facing the road. My windshield was long gone, my entire exhaust system was adjacent to the car, and the roof was just grazing the top of my head. The car was totaled. Luckily a car was not far behind me and saw me go down. No one had cell phones back then, but the driver of the car behind me did have one of those old monstrosities of a car phone (and even those were rare). I was able to call my mom, who called the police. I made sure to tell her I wasn't hurt, just pretty shook up. When the police arrived, he examined the scene, asked if I needed medical assistance, and then told me to wait while he wrote me a ticket. "A ticket?" I asked. "For what?" He told me according to the law he had to write a citation for something even in the event of a one-car crash. But he needed to talk to his sergeant first to figure out what he could even cite me for based on the information I had provided about what happened. After a short while he came back and handed me the ticket. "Failure to use a proper turn signal" was what he cited me for. "What is this?" I asked. "When you were in the right driving lane, and crossed over lanes to reach the ditch on the other side you didn't have your blinker on because I can see it's not on now." I argued that was ridiculous and he proceeded to tell me he could have cited me for worse things. Inattentive driving was one of them. Wreckless driving was the other. "Had another car been coming the other way you could have caused a head on collision." He was right, of course, and the fine for failure to signal was less of an infraction with a smaller fine. The other two could have had consequences like possibly losing my license or making my already 17-year-old insurance so high there'd be no way for me to afford it. I learned a couple of valuable lessons that day. One, don't take your eyes off the road for even a second, and if you are going to drive into a ditch, make sure to turn your blinker on first.