Don’t Answer Your Cell Phone While Driving

You’re speeding down a country road late at night through a slowly building fog, speeding because you’re tired and want to get home. Normally you wouldn’t even be here, but a colleague suggested this shortcut. You’re a lawyer at a firm that deals with work injuries, involuntary manslaughter, car accidents, and the like. Despite having your headlights on, visibility is starting to cut out as the fog slowly gets thicker. You’re just beginning to consider slowing down when your phone rings, interrupting your thoughts.

The man on the other end is gibbering about having been in some sort of car accident. You get calls like this all the time. The man is panicky, as they always are, and you’re waiting for him to take a breath so you can ask who he is.

The man’s voice suddenly stops, but you sense there’s something wrong, and so don’t say anything. After several seconds, he whispers, in an obviously terrified voice, “Who is this?”

You’re about to answer when suddenly, out of the fog, a body approaches and strikes your car. You slam on the brakes as the body arches away and disappears in the fog. You just hit somebody with your car.

This is bad. You were speeding through a fog with no visibility while talking on a cell phone. Your firm handles cases like this, but all you can really do is damage control. You start racking your brain, looking for an excuse that a court might buy when the thought comes to you: You may have just killed someone!

You jump out of your car, and, hanging up on whoever had called you, frantically try to dial your law firm’s senior partner. Really, you’re just punching numbers. You’re pretty panicky, and you just run straight ahead, looking for the body to see if whoever you just hit is still alive. The phone picks up on the other end, and you say, “Oh my God, I just hit someone with my car! I might’ve killed him! There’s this fog and it’s dark and I didn’t see him and I might have killed a man! What do I do? I can’t find his body because of the fog! What do I do?” You babble on for a few more seconds as you run down the road, looking for the body.

Suddenly you stop talking because you experience a shock of déjà vu — not a “sense” of it, but a “shock”. The words that you’re saying, the panicky, desperate descriptions you’re giving over the phone — these are the words you heard right before you hit the man. This is the phone call you received while driving down the road in the fog.

Into the phone, you whisper, “Who is this?”

On the other end, you hear a sharp bark, and the sound of tires squealing. Several seconds of silence. Then a car door opening, and the phone goes dead.

And where’s the body? You should have found it by now. You turn around to see how far you’ve come from your car. You can see the headlights about fifty meters away.

And they’re getting closer.

Credit To – Jim S.