We've all heard that old Sunday School story, right? That if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will hurt him and he'll jump right out. But if you put him in a pot of cold water and sloooowly turn up the temperature, he will stay in until he boils to death.
I recently had a scary experience that was a modern update on this for me.
Here's the spoiler: the cruise control cable in my car had come off and was caught in such a way that my car was accelerating without me pressing the gas pedal. For about a month, possibly even two. 😱
I noticed that something was wrong at first. My car sounded like an airplane and it kept gunning it even when I was stopped with my foot on the brake. My dad suggested the choke might be stuck and suggested a solution. I tried it, it seemed to work, I moved on.
A little later I had problems again. I didn't realize it was the same thing. My car was jerking violently a few times when I braked. (Turns out, that was the transmission struggling to downshift while the engine was running full tilt--or something, excuse my lack of car vocabulary :). This happened while I had Matthew in the car and I was horrified. I asked my dad to come check it out to help me figure out what was going on. But, I told him I thought it was a problem with my brakes. He drove around the block, hit the brakes a lot of times, and didn't notice a problem. I started to think I was crazy.
I should have taken it in then, but I drove around for weeks until the same thing happened again. Meanwhile, I slowly got used to my car not working quite right. I am one of those (annoying, sorry) sticklers who always does the speed limit, but I noticed that often I was going faster than I meant to. I assumed I was just distracted and pressing the gas too hard... it never occurred to me that the car was accelerating on its own. Gradually I was learning to ride my brakes and be very light on the gas pedal, but I didn't realize that it was happening.
After I finally got it fixed last weekend it was like a totally new car. One terrifying moment happened when I turned on the car, shifted into drive, and.... just sat there, not pressing the gas pedal, surprised that it wasn't moving. OF COURSE I know that you have to press the gas pedal to go... but sometime along the line I'd just gotten used to the car leaping forward when I put it in Drive without realizing what was happening, since I did go through the motion of pushing the gas pedal. The drive home was slow too and I realized I was not used to pressing the gas pedal very often. YIKES!
Among the many lessons I learned from this... I thought about other times in life where something seemed off to me, but I doubted myself because others didn't see it, only to get used to being treated in ways I should not have been treated. An important moral of the story is trust yourself, and also get your car checked out if you think there's a problem!
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