Is It Brakes?
I have coined a new phrase for you
My husband Paul has taught me three important things about driving since we got married almost thirteen years ago. Two of them are specific to the driving culture of Massachusetts:
How to zipper-merge.
That if someone cuts you off but you don’t have to step on the brakes, they didn’t cut you off. Conversely, if you cut in front of someone but they didn’t have to step on the brakes, your driving move was completely legitimate.
The third one is more universal, and it is this nugget of essential wisdom:
Brakes don’t get better.
Why would I have had to learn that last one, you ask? Well, I’m glad you’re asking, because I am about to tell you.
We are a two-vehicle household. Mostly I drive the sedan, and Paul drives the pickup, but every so often Paul has to drive somewhere farther, and in order to save on petrol, we swap. This one day Paul had to take the sedan somewhere, and I had a doctor’s appointment in Our Fair City, so I was going to drive the truck in.
Paul was already gone when I started up the truck to head to my appointment, and as I got on the road I noticed that I had to really step on the brakes hard to get the desired response. I thought, “Have the brakes always been like this? I don’t remember them being this much work.”
I guess I could give you the blow by blow about how I kept driving because it really wasn’t that far and surely everyone would be okay, right? And then how I almost plowed into someone in a parking lot, where I (eventually) stopped to call Paul and get some counsel but he didn’t answer right away, so I got back on the road until he called back and then I pulled into another parking lot and canceled my doctor’s appointment and waited for AAA. But why would I subject you to that anxiety?
The long and short of the whole thing was that I learned definitively, both in words and by experience, that if brakes are unresponsive, they will only get less responsive as time goes on. Brakes don’t get better.
The other night for some reason we still haven’t divined, our television picture was extremely dark and blurry. We tried all our streaming services. We checked the connection. We turned the tv on and off. All to no avail. We ended up watching the Antiques Roadshow because even though we couldn’t see the antiques very well, it didn’t matter all that much.
The next day I said, “Do you think our tv has improved, or is it brakes?”
Happily, it was not brakes. We still don’t know why. But anyway, that’s my new diagnostic for things that do or don’t get better. If they do, they’re not brakes. If they don’t, they absolutely are. Next time something’s going wrong, and you’re trying to decide if it needs attention, feel free to ask yourself,
Love this one! And, tech has a mind of its own...thus why my husband has a lot of job security ;) (Plus, he's REALLY GOOD AT HIS JOB)