Despite its ability to make you wish death upon yourself and/or drive off a cliff, the unbearable ubiquity of the monolithic Gotye hit “Somebody That I Used To Know” may have inadvertently saved the life of Croatian Reddit user talfirevic whose aversion to a ballad he describes as “so popular it makes me wanna puke” directly resulted in the driver avoiding a potentially fatal traffic accident. In a post titled Gotye saved my life… literally talfirevic recounts how his decision to stop and skip the song before accelerating at a T intersection afforded him the idle seconds required to save him from a side on collision with a red light running motorbike. OK so maybe his post should have read “Gotye saves irresponsible motorcyclist’s life… literally”, whatever scientists, the point is that this song is inadvertently saving lives now and should be the youngest ever recipient of the Song Hall of Fame’s lifetime achievement award.
Read talfirevic’s post below…
It’s 1:03 am, I came home couple of minutes ago and do I have a story to tell.
I don’t usually share my private stuff with the interwebz but I feel like I need to tell this one.
So not more then 30 minutes ago I was coming home driving my car, roof was off, temperature is in fact perfect, was enjoying a mix CD, volume was pretty high, but I didn’t care. Songs were good… I stopped at the red light just as a song was finishing, for some reason I took a look at my rear view mirror, saw no one. Next song started and I just noticed that light turned yellow, eventually green.
I’ve put my right hand down to put a car into gear, I stopped half way down and said to myself … goddamn not this song AGAIN… Gotye – Somebody I used to know.
As I pressed next on my CD thingey, I hear this roaring sound of a black Yamaha R1 going trough red light on the street that was perpendicular to the one I was on. I shit you not he was driving more then 150 kilometers per hour (round 100 miles per hour) trough RED light.
All this happened in like 2 seconds… Me going for a gear change and going back to CD changer.
I literally stood there frozen for I don’t know how long… Felt totally numb after a giant surge of adrenalin pumping trough my veins.
If that songs wasn’t so damn popular, so popular it makes me wanna puke (ok I’m exaggerating) when I hear it for the 500.000th time I probably would have changed the gear and started moving forward a bit earlier. And that would have caused an imminent collision with that f*cking idiot on the bike.
I would have probably died… We both probably would have.
So Gotye, and YouTube and all local radio stations that played that song for a billion times I thank you with all my heart. You saved my life, and a life of that idiot.
I guess I just wasn’t my time to go.
Cheers internet, you’re awesome!
Toni.
