I backed my truck into your parked car after drinking seven beers at O'Malley's. I got out, looked at the damage, said "fuck" several times and drove away. The next morning I stood beside you looking at the broken taillight and said people had no respect anymore. I am including all of this voluntarily, in the expectation that it will not be used to assign blame.
At the software company where I work, we investigate failures through a blameless postmortem: a written account of what happened, which conditions allowed it to happen and what should change. Employees must be able to describe their actions honestly without being punished. I have adopted this process for the damage to your Honda and ask that you, your husband and Officer Brandt respect its requirements.
Status: Final. Severity: SEV-3, indicating a minor incident. Author: me. Reviewers: you were invited.
Impact
One rear quarter panel, one taillight assembly and one bumper cover. Your body shop's estimate of $3,870 would suggest a more serious classification, but I have kept SEV-3 because the truck remained drivable and I was able to get to work throughout.
You have included the cost of a rental car. That was a separate vehicle introduced after the incident and is outside the scope of this review.
Timeline
- 11:42 p.m. Operator leaves O'Malley's. A bartender says, "You're not fucking driving, are you?" No incident ticket is created.
- 11:47 p.m. Operator begins reversing out of the alley while looking for a dropped vape.
- 11:47 p.m. Contact.
- 11:48 p.m. Operator exits the truck, examines both vehicles and attempts to remove silver paint from his bumper with a wet thumb.
- 11:49 p.m. Operator checks the windows of nearby houses. No stakeholders appear to be awake.
- 11:52 p.m. Truck is moved three blocks away to Larkin Street.
- 12:06 a.m. Operator texts his brother, "if anyone asks i was at yours."
- 8:15 a.m. Incident detected by you.
- 8:32 a.m. Operator joins you at the vehicle and agrees that whoever did this is a piece of shit.
- 8:40 a.m. Doorbell footage is posted to the neighborhood app under "does anyone know this truck." Nine people do.
- Day 6. Operator acknowledges involvement after Officer Brandt visits.
Time to detect was 8 hours 28 minutes. Time to acknowledge was six days. We would like to improve the second number without creating incentives for premature disclosure.
Alcohol
Several participants have described the operator as "drunk." This is a diagnosis unsupported by contemporaneous bloodwork.
Seven beers is an input count. Blood alcohol concentration is a physiological state variable whose reconstruction requires body mass, elapsed time, drink volume and metabolic assumptions. My spreadsheet has twelve adjustable fields. Under the configuration I have selected, I was fit to drive. Your husband obtained a different result by entering my actual weight, which highlights how sensitive these models are to their inputs.
The video shows me falling against the truck while trying to open it. It also shows me subsequently opening it, getting inside and starting the engine. A review that reports only the failed attempt will substantially understate system availability.
The bartender's warning deserves consideration. However, she had served me all seven beers. It is difficult to reconcile her stated assessment of my condition with her continued approval of upstream requests.
Root cause
We used the Five Whys, a method of asking why each contributing condition existed until the underlying cause is identified.
- Why did the truck hit your car? It was reversing toward it.
- Why was it reversing? There is no room in the alley to turn around.
- Why is there no room? The alley is nine feet wide.
- Why is it nine feet wide? It was laid out for horse carts.
- Why was it laid out for horse carts? The block was built in 1887.
The root cause is nineteenth-century urban planning.
Your husband has proposed starting with "Why were you driving after seven beers?" We should resist selecting a starting point merely because it produces the individual we already wanted to blame.
Contributing factors
No runbook. I had a pen and a pharmacy receipt, but no documented procedure for leaving a note. An operator under stress should not be expected to invent a customer-notification workflow beside a damaged vehicle at midnight.
Inadequate safeguards. The truck allowed me to put it in reverse. At no point did it ask whether I had been drinking, whether there was a car behind me or whether I intended to remain at the scene afterward. All three checks were left to the same person.
Evidence quality. Your doorbell camera captured the collision clearly, but the audio also captured me saying, "Nobody saw that." I said this before discovering the camera. It should be treated as an assessment made with the information available at the time.
Communication. My brother replied, "you weren't," to my request for corroboration. We had not agreed on a single source of truth before opening that channel.
What went well
- I did not hit a second car.
- The truck was parked securely on Larkin Street for four days.
- My brother has confirmed that he deleted the messages, reducing the number of conflicting records.
- I have made time to write this report despite a demanding week at work.
Action items
| Action | Owner | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Install convex mirror at alley mouth | The city | Not started |
| Widen alley | The city | Not started |
| Stop serving beer to people who will later drive | O'Malley's | Email sent |
| Write note-leaving runbook | Me | Drafting |
| Move Honda farther from alley | You | Declined |
| Remove identifying video from neighborhood app | You | Declined |
| Complete blameless-culture training | You and your husband | Declined |
| Pay $3,870 | Unassigned | Open |
Discussion
When we spoke on Day 6, you said, "You hit my fucking car and lied to my face." I asked whether you wanted an explanation or someone to punish. You said both. This is exactly the cultural problem that prevents operators from being candid.
Officer Brandt asked who had been driving. I explained that names are generally removed from these documents. He said my name was going in his.
You have also asked why I have not called my insurance company. Their intake form requires me to identify an at-fault party before they have even read the postmortem. I have requested a version of the form that supports systems thinking.
In the meantime I have proposed a shared responsibility model. I maintain and insure my truck. You maintain and insure your Honda. The city owns the alley, and O'Malley's owns the taps. There are opportunities for improvement at every layer.
A follow-up review is scheduled in Municipal Court on the 14th. I have sent the clerk this document and asked that the hearing open with a reminder that nobody is in trouble.
I run postmortems for a living. Blamelessness was always meant to cover people acting in good faith inside the system under review, so they'll tell you what really happened. Leaving the scene and asking your brother for an alibi happened outside any system. They are the incident, and the blameless process has nothing to say about them.
Good faith is assessed at the end of a review. If you assess it first, you've just done blame with a template.
Five Whys has a known failure mode where the chain drifts toward whatever is least uncomfortable for the author. Yours drifted to 1887. Any facilitator I've worked with would make you run a second chain starting from the decision to drive, and then compare the two.
We can run the second chain at the follow-up review. I'd ask that the facilitator be someone without a car on that street.
The husband's spreadsheet isn't an alternative configuration in the ordinary sense if his only change was replacing a fictional body weight with yours.
The at-fault field on the intake form is just how liability coverage works. I adjust auto claims, for context. Your policy pays when you're liable. If you insist there's no at-fault party, there's nothing for your policy to pay, and the claim goes nowhere until someone is at fault, which on these facts is going to be you.
The city's liability coverage should be considered before mine. The alley predates my policy by more than a century.
A blameless review can identify contributing conditions without waiving restitution. Your action list has assigned every preventative change to someone and left the only payment unassigned.
Assigning the payment before the review concludes would privilege one causal layer. The city and the bar have not yet supplied their incident reports.
You define severity by the availability of the vehicle that caused the incident. That leaves the damaged vehicle outside both the impact metric and the shared responsibility model.
The brother's refusal to corroborate your alibi looks like a safeguard that worked. Deleting the messages reduces your ability to learn from it.
What observable condition would have triggered your note-leaving workflow? You had already detected the damage, located the owner's house and checked whether anyone was awake.