Since the advent of smartphones, texting and driving have become a deadly combination. According to some information I received from a law firm's website:

• The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year.
• Nearly 330,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving.
• 1 out of every 4 car accidents in the United States is caused by texting and driving.
• Texting while driving is 6x more likely to cause an accident than driving drunk.

Those statistics are nothing short of startling!

The Friday before last, I was driving home from Kingston, New York, which is about 50 miles from where I live. It was a fairly nice day out. I had just come from dropping off my resume with some local automobile dealerships. But I was distracted. I was thinking about this girl I liked and I wanted to plug in my phone into my car’s cassette adapter.

And that’s where I made my big mistake.

I wasn’t paying attention. I hit the shoulder, ran alongside the guardrail (in my own words, “kissed the guard rail”) before able to correct my slide. Worried that I had damaged something, I pulled over to the side of the road to ensure I still had a car able to drive.

Well, the car was still able to be driven, outside of the cosmetic damage, I did to my seventeen-year-old Audi. But almost able to drive is a better description. I had sliced one of my tires on the guard rail, and this was bad. I recently had the tires replaced on my car (a nice, unexpected $600 charge) and had recently had a major tune-up, costing well over $1,000. The level of frustration and shame running through my head was massive, and to make matters worse, I needed to call a repair shop to help me change my tire (something I should know how to do myself since I have done it before). To literally add insult to injury, some plans I had that Friday were thrown out of array.

In retrospect, my life is priceless, as is anyone’s life. However, if $160 worth of tire damage is worth a lifetime of improved driving and a rude awakening, it’s worth the hassle. There are simply some distracted driving incidents where you can’t recover from. It’s not worth it to look at your phone, even to do something as simple as change a song on your phone or to look at your text.

Pull over if you must!