What a headache!

On Wednesday my friend Lindsay called me and asked me to come over and help her jump her car. When I got there I had to park in her driveway which I never do. After we successfully got her car started I was backing out of her driveway and was fully focused on not running into her garbage cans when I ran right into a parked car on the street behind me. Ugh! I pulled forward and parked the car to get out and assess the damage. The owner of the car was visiting her sister who lives across the street from Lindsay and came out to see what had happened. As I looked at this women's car I honestly didn't see any real damage. There were a couple of little scratches but that's all I saw. Right away she said "I'll have to get that fixed." Of course any damage that I caused I am happy to pay for but something about the way she said this and how quickly she said it made me worry about the headache that was coming. I let her copy my insurance information and I knew I'd be hearing from her soon, however I didn't expect to hear from her as soon as I did...5 minutes later when I walked in the door after just leaving her! She wanted to know if we would be paying for the damages out of pocket or filing a claim with our insurance. I told her that I didn't know and that I hadn't even told my husband yet and tried to very nicely tell her that I needed to feed my kids lunch and get them down for naps but would call her in the next couple of hours. She said that she would hold off on doing anything until then. I called Bill and told him what happened and he was very calm about the whole thing, which I wasn't. I couldn't stop crying but am still not sure why I was so upset. Probably b/c I have had a super clean driving record for over 15 years and really didn't want to screw it up. Bill told me to have this women get an estimate on her damages, we would get an estimate on ours (the panel on the right side of my car was sticking out) and if we could pay out of pocket then we would. I then called this lady back, it was an hour after I had last spoken to her, and found that she had already called my insurance company and filed a claim. Are you kidding! See, I knew when I met her that this wasn't going to be easy. In her defense, she didn't realize that by calling the Allstate 1-800 number she was automatically filing a claim. However, I'm still not sure why she called the 1-800 number when my agent's number was the first one listed on my insurance card but I guess that's the only number she found. Soooo, in the past couple of days I have gotten an estimate on my damages, $942.00, and her damages, $150, and we are hoping to just pay for hers out of pocket, not fix my car and not cancel the claim. When I went to get the estimate on my car they were able to pop my side panel back in so basically there are just a couple of scratches on my bumper. The reason my damages are so high is b/c my bumper is all one piece and they have to replace the whole thing. Anyway, the only question left to be answered is whether or not our insurance will go up. Even if we pay out of pocket the claim has been filed and my agent doesn't know if that will effect my rates. I'm still trying to get that question answered but hopefully in the next week this whole mess will be cleared up and I will definitely be paying very close attention when I back out of driveways!