Man. Feel almost like I cursed the guy by writing about him. Like, 10 days ago, when I brought up that the Saints and Colts had shots at going unbeaten … and then the Saints lost the next day and the Colts lost their next game, too.

(I’m one of those people who suspects, if doesn’t quite believe, that they can influence events, oh, worldwide, by making statements about them. A sort of karmic thing. If I talk up someone, they’re due for a fall, if I trash someone they’re about to rally. Especially on sports topics.)

Anyway, our driver, Benjamin.

I went out at 1:45 today, and there he was right in front of the house. (Leah had the day off.) I gave him a 2010 calendar, one that The National distributed with the newspaper a few days ago. It’s really quite nice. A monthly calendar you can hang on the wall, with some very nice UAE-specific color photos. Benjamin seemed to like it.

And then he launched into a description of his serious wreck from the day before.

Not long after dropping off Leah and me, on Monday, he had picked up a Lebanese woman and was traveling on Muroor Road, doing about 65 kph — or about 40 mph. He was in the far right lane of what is a three-lane road.

Here in Abu Dhabi, you don’t turn right onto a street … you follow a curving road onto it, and then you carefully merge.

Or you’re supposed to carefully merge, anyway.

According to Benjamin, a woman from Egypt came out of one of the merges and her car struck the right-rear door of his taxi.

He said the back end of the car was knocked to the left, and the car skidded. “I am in the third lane when she hits me, and I finish in the first lane,” he said.

He was frightened but unhurt. The Lebanese passenger, however, got knocked around in the back seat, and she was angry as well as dinged up. “The Lebanese lady gets out of the taxi and she starts a war with the Egyptian lady,” Benjamin said, smiling at the memory.

I asked him if he knew what they were shouting at each other, and he said, “I am not speaking the Arabic.” Me neither, I said.

The traffic police got to them fairly quickly, it seems, and they apparently took almost no time to decide (correctly) that the Egyptian woman was at fault. They wrote Benjamin a ticket absolving him of blame — which is absolutely critical for cab drivers, because if they are found to be at fault in a road incident they can be fined heavily and even lose their jobs — and sent home, which can be a disaster for their families, who often depend on remittances from expat relatives to survive.

He said it was his second wreck of the year, and his third since being here — all of 21 months. “And I am not at fault for any of them,” he said.

We mused about the madness of driving in the UAE, and I asked him if it was as bad in the Philippines. “Only when the people are drinking,” he said.

The one upside to this is … he got a new cab out of the deal. Brand new. “I can still smell the new car smell,” I said to him.

He seemed pleased to have the new cab … but I’m sure he would rather have kept the older one and avoided the wreck.

He dropped me off at the paper. I told him, “See you tomorrow. Be careful out there.”

We would like to have a long relationship with him. Much longer than three days, anyway.