Tecate Cerveza + Car Accident = Creator Application

This is a re-print of a post entitled “Making a Turd Salad,” that I published last week on my blog for Arizona State University. Raffic Aslam from Zoho gave it some press on the Zoho Blogs as well. Pete and I thought it would be appropriate to publish here as well. Enjoy:

Last Wednesday, my wife was hit by a drunk driver as she was coming home from the gym. I was at home studying for an exam when I got her frantic phone call. Luckily it was right down the street from our house, so I was there within a few minutes. I won’t go into details about the accident, but the following tidbits should give you an idea of what we’ve been dealing with for the past week:

1. The jerk that hit her had an open 18-pack of Tecate Cerveza with several empty cans on the floor of his van.
2. He tried to leave the scene of the crime. Twice.
3. My wife ran after his (flaming, sparking, smoking) minivan, into the intersection, ripped his door open and yelled at him to get out of his car.
4. My wife has red hair. She just came from the gym. She had just been hit at around 35 mph from behind, slammed into the car in front of her, and her airbag deployed. She was not a happy camper. I would not have liked to be on the receiving end of item #3 above.
5. There is almost $13,000 dollars in damage to our car. My wife is doing well. The jerk that hit her is 100% at fault.

Here is some choppy video I took with my cell phone at the accident:

Many thanks to the witnesses that stopped, to the police officers that were on the scene, and to the many friends and family that have asked how we are doing. I’m glad she’s alive.So…you might be wondering how I will tie this event into a post on a technology-themed blog. Sit tight - here it comes.

This isn’t the first time one of us has been in a car accident. My wife was hit a couple months before we got married, and I was rear-ended about a year ago. I guess you could say we’re pretty good at it. With this experience, I know that there are a ton of phone calls to make, receipts to save, people to contact. It can be a nightmare just keeping everything straight. That’s probably why most people call a lawyer.

Since there were no broken bones, and everybody (surprisingly) had insurance, we decided to try to get through this on our own. While I was on hold with the insurance company the next morning, I logged into my Zoho Creator account and built an application for us to manage all the details related to the accident. It took me about an hour to build it. You can demo and download my Accident Tracker application in the Creator Marketplace.

Below are a few screenshots of what it includes:

Collapsible sidebar with links to main functions:

Tabbed menus along top to easily switch between views:

Record notes from a conversation:

(This screen pulls data from the contacts you have added so you can tie a conversation back to a person.)

View Past Conversations:

(With Creator’s built-in features, it’s easy to filter this list however you want. This makes it easy to reference an old conversation.)

Behind the scenes:

(Creator makes it easy to notify me of any additions. I have it set up to send an email to my account and my wife’s account anytime a new conversation is logged. This way we can both keep each other updated if we happen to talk to someone.)

I’ve also set this up so I can upload scanned documents. This came in handy when I was trying to pick up our rental car on Saturday. I needed to give my insurance company some information from the accident report. My father-in-law had his laptop with him, so I pulled up the app and opened the document I had previously uploaded. Wam, bam, thank-you m’am. I would not have been able to get my rental car without it.

A friend of my wife was pondering the validity of a time-honored cliche several years ago. I’ll paraphrase what he said. “I know that when life gives you lemons, you’re supposed to make lemonade. So what am I supposed to do when life gives me turds? Am I supposed to make a turd salad?”

While I’m not happy that life has handed us a pile of turds lately, it gave me the opportunity to brush up on my computer-hacking skills. So if anyone’s hungry for some salad, let me know.

And for crying out loud - DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.

Pascal, a Zoho Creator MVP joins us!

I am very glad to report that Pascal Veilleux has accepted my invitation to join our blog and will use this space to share with you his Zoho Creator projects, ideas and best practices. Pascal has embraced web 2.0 technologies that help businesses  and has a proven track record of bringing about considerable improvements to his clients. He has also contributed his knowledge and experience in quality methodologies such as Six Sigma and ISO 9000 to the Zoho Creator community with applications such as the Six Sigma Project Charter, which you can download for free from the Marketplace.

I’m looking forward to reading Pascal’s postings and learning from him.

Bienvenue Pascal!