Last week, I was headed to class as usual via the ‘restricted service drive’ near the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center. Crossing the service road in a steady trickle of students, there was a car coming toward us. Looking at the car, and having the driver, I thought, acknowledge me, I assumed it was safe to cross. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be stupid of me.

A second later the car crashed into me, at probably 10 miles per hour. It didn’t knock me down but, well, it hurt. My leg buckled to the bumper and my hand and forearm were firmly on the hood.

I was expecting the driver to stop and ask if I was alright, but as I moved away from the front of the car, it drove off rather quickly.

Since I was almost to my class at this point, I decided to suck it up and forget about it. But the more I thought about what happened while in class, the more my leg hurt and the angrier I got. I’ve never hit a pedestrian myself ‘ knock on wood ‘ but I’m assuming that the general protocol would be to stop and make sure everything is alright, at the very least.

By the end of my class, I had thought about it adequately and was pissed off enough to go to the police. When I got to Binghamton’s New York State University Police, I reported what happened to the cops and, as suggested, was examined by Harpur’s Ferry.

An alert was sent out to patrolling cars, but since over an hour had passed, nothing came of the search. In my confusion, I was only able to remember the car type and the first three characters of the license plate, so my memory wasn’t of much help.

The police asked me if they should issue a ticket if they found the person. I said that they shouldn’t, but requested that they say to the driver something along the lines of ‘What the hell?’

The moral of my story is that everyone should be cautious when walking and driving around campus. Had I been more wary crossing the street, which I certainly will be in the future, I wouldn’t have anything to write about for this week’s issue. There are too many students here that are both moronic and distracted drivers. Totally letting your guard down as a pedestrian isn’t smart, either, as I learned firsthand.

I also have one more point, for drivers specifically: If you hit someone, stop your damn car. Although the police will probably never get to pose my ‘What the hell?’ question to the anonymous car driver, if the person that hit me reads this, I hope that next time he hits someone, he’ll take a second look.