my first thought: I am doomed

[jaeclectic]

As you may recall, just after I rented the apartment in SF, before actually having moved in, while in the stage of taking things by car -- indeed, more or less the situation in which I find myself now -- my old car died a spectacular death in the middle of the Bay Bridge.


I quit work early and packed up a carload of stuff and drove off in the rain. Had as much fun as you might expect unloading in the rain on the other end, all the while bitterly contemplating the past several weeks of dry sunny weather. And you know, this was serious rain. Not your standard Bay Area insidious perpetual drizzle, it was actually dramatic, torrential rain.

But I got it done, managed to find my way back onto the freeway without getting lost (a significant improvement over yesterday's performance), all was well.

Then, as I drive along in the pouring rain, I notice that a warning light has come on on my dashboard. In fact, two warning lights. Both very ominous and completely unintelligible (a lesson in the hazards of icon design, but not one that I was appreciating at that moment). The first one is an exclamation point inside a horseshoe-like shape. The second is a triangle inside an almost complete circle made with an arrow. Both are yellow. I keep looking and can't glean any information from these symbols except that something bad is happening and I should feel fear.

So there I am on the freeway approaching the Bay Bridge, thinking "I am doomed. Every time I move, my car is going to break down in the middle of the Bay Bridge".

So I get through the toll booth and there is a little bit of shoulder so I pull over and get out the owners manual. By the time a cop comes along to ask me what I'm doing there, I have found the applicable yet sadly confusing page: The exclamation point is the flat tire warning, and the other one is something else that I don't immediately comprehend, and if both of them come on it means something in Canadian models which as far as I know mine isn't. So the cop walks around the car and says the tires look fine, and proceeds to give me a little lecture because I am pulled over in an unsafe place and I didn't get clear of the white line.

And I am feeling pretty uneasy but the car had been driving fine so I proceed across the bridge, the whole time chanting in my head "please just make it across the bridge, I don't want to break down on the bridge". And by the time I got across (very slowly, in the fine combination of rush-hour traffic and intense gushing rain), it has occurred to me that what I should do is drive straight to the Mini dealer and ask them. Which I do, and the nice person there takes a look, and... lo and behold, the lights have gone out.

But he says that he has seen this before and it means the tire something sensor is bad, and it is probably an intermittent fault that will come back, so I should schedule an appointment to get it looked at, which I have done. Despite a nagging suspicion that it might have something to do with driving through deep water, in which case it might not come back.

But indeed all's well that ends well.

Except I am in that post-adrenaline collapse state and I am not feeling very eager to spend the rest of the evening (or possibly all night) finishing packing. *sigh*

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*hug*