Thanks to everyone for their support. It means a lot.
Relevant points, in no particular order:
It does appear at this point that it was an accident; that is, unintentional.
The driver was a guy, allegedly an administrator at a school down here, in his month-old Toyota (he didn’t even have license plates yet) with his family. They had apparently just returned from a day trip to San Diego and decided to stop in for some Yu-Gi-Oh cards.
I was not in the shop at the time.
(I have most Fridays off at the day job thanks to a cool summer hours plan, and so went to the movies with a former co-worker. I had just returned home when Kris came in and told me that Jay would need me at the shop.
Why? I asked.
Because someone ran their car through the front of the shop, she replied.)
Apparently, the driver came into the shop in a multistep process.
- One, his car revs up over the parking block and onto the sidewalk. The people that were in the shop look up to see what was going on. He pauses.
- Two, he goes forward through the front glass - CRASH! - and pauses.
- Three, he chugs through the shop, stopping only when he hits the back wall.
And then, dust settling, glass all about, people still unaccounted for, he proposed to “just back it out.”
My first thought? Drunk driver. Since the police and paramedics interviewed him, I’m willing to reduce (but not eliminate) the possibility of that being the cause. My current theory? He was tired after his day in SD and hit the wrong pedal in his new car. Three times.
The driver claimed there was some sort of mechanical issue with the car.
The store has some insurance, and so did the driver, as required in the purchase of his new car. We’re not expecting much challenge against the store; it’s not as if the building leapt out into the street in front of his auto.
The accident happened on a Friday afternoon. Here in Hell Centro, that’s pretty well the kiss of death for getting anything to happen promptly. The insurance adjuster said that the initial process would take a couple of business days - which pushes initial progress out until sometime today.
The door, such as it is, is a pair of large pieces of plywood flanking a doorway gap. In the evenings, we bolt a third piece of plywood to it. We’re going to have to do this until we get a new door installed…
…which, we found out yesterday, won’t be for a couple of weeks. Why it takes two weeks for a new door, I don’t know.
Business has been pretty good. The insurance agent kinda suggested closing down for the weekend, but we stayed open on Saturday (and even got the store in a good enough condition that we were able to run a prescheduled tournament) and had a strong sales day.
Our POS system got mangled, but somehow the main server’s hard drive survived. Troll and I ended up cobbling together a single functioning register from the pieces we had remaining and a spare PC tower he had.
We’re really, really hoping that the insurance companies don’t screw around with us. The assumption is that, since we weren’t at all at fault, the insurers will be prompt and thorough in their compensation. The business should be able to float things until then. If that assumption doesn’t prove true, however, the outlook is far hazier.
