As I turned south onto Fowler street from 10th, I was greeted with solid traffic northbound as Alumni and assorted other game watchers rushed to get home. I was going about 15 mph and it was lightly drizzling when a guy jumped out from between two SUVs in the opposite direction of traffic and met my bumper. I slammed on the brakes, but they don't do much good in the rain with no time to react. The person slammed into my bumper and then fly up onto the windshield, smacking their head on the lower part of the driver's side.
An officer of some sort (not GTPD) was directing traffic and saw the whole thing, and he radioed for an ambulance. We tried to calm the guy down and give first aid, but he was going crazy (understandably). In the midst of the struggle, the guy was found to have a fair amount of crack cocaine and other fun obviously on his person (i.e. no search was required; I think it just fell out of his pocket). Eventually the officer handcuffed him and whatnot. Once I was free to go I got out of there, and I have no idea what happened to the guy. I didn't notice the small crack in the windshield until I parked the car in the deck (and my hands were still shaking at the point), and I've never felt the desire to pursue the issue.
In any case, cracks being what cracks are, they grow.
The principal of crack propagation seems simple enough -- I've even taken steps before to stop the spread of a crack in a cymbal by drilling a neat hole in the end of it. Of course, none of this would have indicated to me that I shouldn't lightly thump my windshield in the area of the preexisting crack. For those not familiar with the previous damage, it was a single crack from the bottom of the windshield up that was only slightly annoying. About the only really good thing about breaking it now was that I hadn't gotten around to applying the new Texas inspection and registration stickers to the inside of the window yet, and thus the folks doing the new installation will not have to mess with transferring the old ones (which they usually don't do a great job of, IME).
As of 10/24/2000, the windshield is fixed. It only took a little less than a year and three bucks less than $200 for me to accomplish this feat. I feel obligated to point out that the crack was singular in nature and nowhere near as bad as any of the pictures here for the vast majority of the time I drove with it. The impetus for getting it repaired came when I bumped the windshield with my hand whilst out on a ride at Yellow River and the crack spidered.
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