There are a lot of things I hope don't go wrong with my car when I'm on the road. I hope a tire doesn't blow. I hope the brakes don't fail. I hope the engine doesn't catch fire.
But apparently, my worries don't cover the spectrum. Because the one thing it never occurred to me to worry about going wrong on the road is the one thing that did go wrong.
I was driving on I-76 between Philadelphia and King of Prussia, a stretch of road which has been the last leg on the road of life for many people. It's not a place where you want things to go wrong with your car.
It's also not the road you really want to find yourself driving along in a torrential downpour. But that is exactly where I found myself the other day. So, I dealt with it. I slowed waaaay down, along with the other motorists. I paid extra attention, and cranked up the speed of the windshield wipers. And it wasn't all so bad, really. I emerged on the other side of the storm, and was driving happily to the steady swish-swish, swish-swish of the wipers when the swish-swish, swish-swish suddenly became a swish-swish, swish- .
I stared at my windshield in confusion. The wipers had just....stopped. Mid-wipe. They hadn't even managed to drag themselves back to their nest in the slow agony of death. They dropped dead smack-dab center of my field of vision, as if their malicious last wish was not only to abandon their duty to wrangle visibility from hostile precipitation, but to become the very objects of visual obscuration themselves.
Mutinous swabbers!
But after the shock of a heretofore unfathomable betrayal passed, the panic set in. Because the sky had not cleared, and the road was still wet, and I was still ten minutes from my destination.
But I managed to get there in one piece, even if that piece was quivering and driving 30mph. And the wipers? Have been laid to rest. But not before another exciting incident involving a previously clear sky, a gradual increase of lightening on the horizon, and a terse race home.
(The storm won.)