The Rule of Threes + ice = adrenaline rush

So a bit over a week ago, one of my D&D friends got into a fairly serious accident. Though both cars were seriously injured, no one was hurt and it was relatively easy to deal with the insurance and police. It was a fairly shitty night for my friend, but all in all it wasn't the worst case scenario by any stretch of the imagination.

Perhaps a week later, while giving my friend a ride to something or other, my sunroof, rather than opening, jammed itself into a partially open state and then refused to anything else. I tinkered with it, but I'm going to need to take it to Saturn to get it repaired, or at least closed so rain and show don't just melt into my car.

Last night I heard from another of our D&D friends that he, who drives school buses, got into an accident. Someone decided to stop dead ahead of him in the middle of a 55mph zone and though the idiot who stopped escaped without being touched, my friend's bus totaled the poor car between them. This may lead to immediate termination of my friend's job.

So last night at the game, the bus driver made a comment about the "rule of threes", how bad things always seem to come in threes. The first accident, my sunroof breaking, the second accident. I didn't say anything, as I had no wood to knock on, but I thought "my broken sunroof hardly seems like it counts." Turns out I shouldn't have even thought anything.

When leaving the D&D game last night I had to take several minutes to de-ice my car, as everything had frozen nicely. The roads were also dicey at best, so I was definitely both on my guard and driving slower than normal. It didn't help that I was dog tired, but one does what one must to get home at night. When I was only two, three minutes away from home, that "rule of three" came after me with a vengeance.

I was driving slightly above the speed limit through a long since green light when the person coming up to the red, who hadn't noticed the red, tried to emergency stop. On ice. So he pulled out directly in font of me when I had just entered the intersection.

Motherfucker.

Fortunately my nearly instantaneous reaction of punch brakes, depress clutch, and grab the steering wheel prepared for emergency avoidage was perfectly timeed. The idiot, realizing that both I and another car behind me were in danger of crashing right into the guy jammed on his accelerator in an attempt to get out of the way. At this point my ABS was clicking like crazy, trying to help me stop on the slick roads. When the idiot's back tires let go and started to swing at me, I realized I had two choices: hit this idiot, or steer like a madman and potentially crash into a curb.

While not letting up on the brakes, I steered right to get around the idiot, and managed to miss his rear bumper by about, oh, six inches. Then I immediately turned left, hard and prayed my tires and brakes were up to the job. Thankfully they were, I managed to miss the curb by inches as well. It was then that I noticed I was between the wildly fishtailing idiot and the curb, so I just kept the brakes on till he moved away from me.

"Holy fucking shit that was close!" I believe is what I said. I let the idiot pull away and turn at the next corner before I started moving again. I had to move quickly as the people behind me didn't appear to have noticed the near accident and weren't slowing down. My adrenaline was pumping at that point, but I forced myself to calm down and drive home.

I made it home without further incident.

So I guess that Rule of Three is out to get me. Now I have to be extra careful about everything. Know what I have to say about that?

Fuck you Rule of Three!