Speaking of Something Dumb… · 9 March 2024
I do not know if you ever do dumb stuff, but I do. Seemingly all the time. Usually, when I think I am being clever.
It does not snow that often where I live, but I have lived in snowy places during my lifetime. So I really ought to know better. I ought to know better than to turn on the windshield wipers when the door is open. Especially if there is powdery snow on said windshield.
I remember being younger living in the Spokane area and turning on the car to warm it up. I would just hang one foot out the door and start up the car, turn on the defrost, get out, and scrape the windows. It was pretty normal preparation for winter driving. I am not sure exactly why I just left the door open and kept that one foot dangling, but I did it most of the time. Maybe I just wanted to take one less step when getting out to scrape the windows. I am not positive, but that sounds about right.
Living in the Seattle area is a bit different. Not quite as much snow. But I suppose that old habits, even habits from long ago and not often used in the present, still rear their heads now and again. Which happened a couple times recently. The first time that I left the door open to turn on the car, there was a tiny bit of snow on my car. And apparently, I had left the windshield wipers on when I turned the car off, so I got a tiny bit of snow on the inside of the door. Silly me. But no harm.
The second time, I remembered that I did not want the windshield wipers to be on, so I thought I ought to shut them off. Apparently, I had turned it off when I turned the car off, so that if it did snow, the wipers would not push the snow off the windshield onto the door, onto my leg, and into the car. But alas. I pushed the wiper selector up to intermittent and the wiper swished all that powdery snow onto the door and my leg, and into the car. And it was not a little bit of snow, it was a lot of snow. How silly. In reality, I should have checked the wiper settings before I turned the car on. That would have been the wise thing to do. But I do not think anybody has called me wise. At least not seriously. And definitely not recently.
It is funny. Whenever I do something dumb, I think that I ought to write about it. Okay. Not whenever. After all, if I wrote about all the dumb stuff I do whenever I do them, I would never run out of material. But I did need to write about these two incidents. After all, they were within about a week of each other. I could not believe that I did the same dumb thing twice in such a short period of time. Ah well.
I am sure that I will turn on my car with my leg hanging out the door again. Just because I want to save that extra motion when getting out to scrape the snow or ice off my windows. (Yes, I do scrape them all.) But perhaps I will make sure the windshield wipers are off before I turn on the car. After all, now I have written about this particular dumb thing that I did when I thought I was being clever.
© 2024 Michael T. Miyoshi
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