This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/TheMicrocosm on 2023-09-18 04:03:21.

This actually did happen today! On the off chance that the woman who was in the minivan is on here, sorry again and hope you know it was an accident and that I in fact was trying to pass by you as quickly as possible so as not to make you uncomfortable, though I definitely should have thought through my approach more.

There’s a park not far from where I live that is nice to visit, and a route that I often take to get there involves taking a path between some vegetation and someone’s driveway. So I was walking over there a few hours ago when the aforementioned woman in a minivan drove past me and, when I was almost at the entrance of the path, she parked right in front of it.

Since I was nearly there, it didn’t occur to me at the time to just take a left and walk around the minivan then loop around to get to the path, and to be seen by the woman and not to startle her. Nope, instead I figured I could not only squeeze through the narrow space between the vehicle and the foliage then get onto the path and avoid bothering her at all, but to trot past and get to the path as quickly as possible.

Well that effort couldn’t have gone worse, since I ran into a branch facing me that poked my right shoulder and caused me to slam into the door to the backseat. Though thankfully I wasn’t injured, my plan to bypass a potentially socially awkward interaction backfired and exacerbated the scenario beyond probably anything imaginable. As I recovered myself and tried to just keep walking and get out of there as quickly as possible, I looked through the passenger window to see the woman understandably quite startled, and waved and said, “Sorry, I hit the branch!” She waved back, seemingly expressing understanding that I didn’t mean to yeet myself into the side of her minivan, but regardless I was kind of rethinking my existence when I was finally on the path and in the park where I walked around for a while enjoying the decent weather, and can only imagine what she was thinking about that whole turn of events.

TL;DR: Tried to avoid a socially awkward situation when someone parked right in front of where I was going to walk, only for my approach to backfire completely when I ran into a protruding branch and fell right against her minivan.