As I was walking to the subway after work this evening, I heard a woman let out a shriek followed by a bystander, another woman, exclaiming, “Oh, my God!” I turned to see what had happened and saw a young lady standing in a crosswalk with her phone in her hand. She was attempting to take a picture of a vehicle, a white minivan, that had stopped a few feet away.
The driver of the minivan must have stopped when he heard the shriek. He rolled down the window, looked back toward the young woman and asked her, “Are you okay?”
“You just HIT me!” she said angrily.
“I’m sorry,” said the driver. He must have been quite shocked.
“Well, you should be more careful,” the young woman scolded. “You really almost hit me.”
At this point, my brain went, “What??”
There’s a world of difference between hitting someone with a car and “really almost” hitting them. I’m quite certain that anyone who has ever been hit by a car would trade that experience for being “almost” hit by a car. Being “almost” hit is far less painful or injurious; only your feelings get hurt.
Now, here’s something to ponder. Imagine that a car passed close by you but didn’t actually hit you. Would your first impulse be to pull out your mobile phone to take a photo of the car? If so, for what purpose? Would you accuse a driver of hitting you when that’s not at all what really happened? What kind of person would do something like that?
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