What Would You Have Done?

I went to a local pub on Friday night to catch up with the dads from the primary school my sons attended. We get together about once a month and there's a lot of local football and cricket crossover so it's a long-standing friendship group and all very convivial. The pub even has a nightclub attached to it, so it's occasionally squirmingly funny if we step out the front door of the bar for a smoke and somebody spots their underage daughter in the queue.

I'd arrived late and had to park a fair way away. I was walking head down into a chilly northerly when I saw a late model Holden accelerate hard into a left turn off the main road I was walking along. The bang followed quickly. The driver had lost control of the car when he'd hit the cobbled bluestone guttering between the main road and the street he'd just turned into. I didn't actually see the impact but when I drew level with him I could see he'd T-boned a parked car. No-one was in it but if someone had been they might have suffered an injury. If anyone had been crossing the street it might have been worse.

He walked towards the main road shaking his head, swearing loudly and exaggerating his reaction in that way the young, drunk and attention-seeking seem to always do. Some of his nightclub contemporaries were starting to gather.

I walked just close enough to get his registration number and that of the car he'd hit, dialled 000 and asked for police. I gave them all the details. I was about half way through my description of the event when they asked me what state I was calling from. This threw me out a little as I'd assumed I was talking to someone in Victoria.

I thought the young bloke had done something pretty stupid and that if he'd ended up reversing and pissing off, the owner of the parked car would be out of pocket. So I rang to make sure there was a record of what happened. And also in the hope that whatever consequences were visited upon the driver, they might act as a deterrent against any future behaviour of a similarly stupid nature.

I continued on to the pub but only stayed about an hour. When I left, the Holden was just being taken away by tow-truck and the young driver was helping police with their enquiries.

Look, as dilemmas go this is fairly pissy but I think I would have felt pretty bad afterward if I'd just kept walking and left it up to someone else. So what would you have done?