Karma Comes In Vicious Cycles

My partner is an HGV — heavy goods vehicle — driver and his current job involves driving around the city emptying the big commercial rubbish bins that shops and the like often have at the back of their stores, so the vehicle he drives is like an oversized bin lorry.

A few weeks ago, he came home from work early, a little shaken. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me that he had had an “incident” with a cyclist. Immediately concerned that he had killed or injured someone, I made him tell me the whole story.

He was stopped at a red light on a busy crossroads in the city. The light turned green and he started to move forward, intending to go straight across. As he began to move, a cyclist shot out of the junction to his right — on a red light, illegal in the UK — and immediately turned right, up the same road my partner was headed. My partner slammed on his brakes and somehow managed not to hit the cyclist; I’m sure you can appreciate that it’s not easy to stop a large vehicle, filled to the brim in the back with waste. Naturally, he blew his horn to let the cyclist know what an idiot he’d been.

Anyway, he moved off again and headed up the road the cyclist had gone up. He saw another car ahead of him, indicating that it was going to take a side road to the left. The cyclist was rapidly catching up to the other car. As the car was preparing to turn, a second car arrived at the end of the side road and, as these side roads are pretty narrow, car #1 had to stop in order to let car #2 out first to make room.

The cyclist at this point noticed my partner approaching from behind and turned around to make an obscene gesture at him. In doing so, the cyclist failed to notice that car #1 had stopped and bam! He smacked into the rear end of the car and flew right over the top of it, landing ungraciously on its bonnet!

My partner obviously stopped, and the cyclist was fine bar a few bruises, but it still shook him as it could’ve been so much worse. He did eventually find the instant karma a little amusing, though!