MOSS GREEN BUMPER

A borrowed car came back from a quick ciggie run with its front end wrecked, and two days later it was sitting in the driveway wearing a moss-green bumper on a silver body.

That was the surprise waiting for the poster, who had handed the car over to a friend just to drive and pick up some ciggies. On the way, the friend got caught in an accident and, in the poster's words, "completely fucked the front bumper up."

The poster did not have much room for inconvenience. They use the car for work in traffic control, and after the crash they told the friend he needed to pay for a new bumper ASAP because they'd start losing money on Ubers if the car stayed off the road. The friend said he'd "get it fixed in a couple of days."

A couple of days later, the car was back.

Only now the front bumper was a different color.

The poster says the replacement bumper looked "moss green" against the silver paint of the rest of the car. They assumed the repair was only halfway done and asked when the bumper was getting repainted. The friend's answer was not much of an answer at all.

"Whenever you want," he said.

Then he added, "I don't know, you can do it whenever you want to."

That put the poster in a bind. They took it to mean the repaint was up to them, and they told the friend he should pay for the paint job too. The reply was immediate: "No dude you're paying for the paint job."

The friend then argued that he had already replaced the bumper. If the poster wanted it to match the rest of the car, he said, the poster should have said so earlier so it could have been done while the bumper was being fixed. In the poster's retelling, the friend's response was basically, "that's bullshit because he already replaced the bumper," and that if the poster wanted it to match the car, "you should have told him so that he could have got it done while the bumper was getting fixed."

The poster pushed back on that. To them, it seemed obvious that a bumper should match the car after a crash, especially when the person fixing it was the one who caused the damage. They wrote, "I feel like it's assumed that the bumper color is going to match the car when you have to fix a car THAT YOU CRASHED."

But with a silver car and a moss-green bumper sitting in the driveway, the question was no longer just about the crash. It was about who was paying to make the mistake invisible again.