My adventure with cars and a ditz

Yesterday evening, my mom had a meeting at church, and she also wanted to get some grocery shopping done. So she asked me if I would drop her off at the church, go get groceries, and then come back and pick her up. No problem. So I go drop her off, and as I'm pulling out of the parking space, I don't turn sharply enough, and I scrape the car behind me. Shit. So Mom comes hurrying back across the parking lot, and I hop out of the car and we go inspect the damage.

You can hardly see it. I mean, I didn't think I hit it very hard, but it was even less than I'd expected. No dents, barely a scratch; nothing much that won't come off with a bit of buffing. So Mom said to go on and get groceries, and she'd go in and find out whose car it was (assuming it was somebody in the meeting; I mean, who else would be parked in the church parking lot, right?) and it would be no problem. Seriously, if you didn't know it happened, you wouldn't notice the mark.

But no. As I'm getting back in the car and she's turning to go in the church, this chick comes running up from the house next door, looking like the sky is falling. Apparently the car belongs to her fiancé, and they can't park it in the garage or driveway on their property, due to some vague reasoning having to do with the landlady. (Right.) She asks if I hit the car, and we reply that yes, I did indeed make contact. She comes around to look at the front of her (fiancé's) car, and has to ask where the damage is. I would assume that having to have the damage pointed out would make one realize that it's not serious, but no, she says her fiancé is "paranoid" about his car and we'd better just call—well, who do we call? The insurance company, right? Or the police? She doesn't know—she's apparently on the point of a nervous breakdown or something. So my mom, amazing person that she is, is trying to communicate to the woman that we don't have to call anybody; there's not enough damage to meet any insurance deductible in existence, so we exchange phone numbers and info, and if repairs are required, we'll pay for it. No big deal. We'll come and buff it out ourselves; it's not difficult.

Well, no, we have to do it exactly by the book, 'cause her fiancé's paranoid, and he'll kill her if anything happens to his precious car, blah, blah, blah. (Sidenote: It's a dingy-looking, late-90s Pontiac Grand Prix. Does anyone else see the ridiculousness here?) So who do we call? Well, my mother says, first you call the police. The ditz is ready to call 911, I swear to god. So my mother (I'm really glad she was there; I woulda killed this chick. As it was, I didn't have to talk much.) explains to her that no, you don't call 911 for a parking lot ding, if you insist upon calling someone, you call the local police station. So she does, and we wait half an hour for a cop to finally show up, and when he gets there and sees the "damage," you can tell, he just can't believe he got called for this. So he gives us "exchange of information forms" and we exchange information, like Mom suggested we do in the first place, and so we ended up wasting 45 minutes getting each other's phone numbers.

My god, the stupidity.

So now we get to wait and see if her fiancé's as big an idiot as she is. I swear, if I end up paying for them to repaint the bumper on their decade-old Pontiac, I will lose what little faith I have left in humanity.