Mild Amusement

Here in the United States, we drive on the right side of the road. We walk on the right side of the road. If you're on the escalator and you want to just stand while others walk around you, you stand on the right side. Basically, we tend to default to being on the right when in doubt. Many of us know, on an intellectual level, that people in other countries "drive on the wrong side of the road," but it's still just a random fact that we tuck away in the back of our minds. It's when you go to another country and actually experience that difference that things start to get interesting. Like, say, when I went to Japan. Given the title and the lead in to this post, you can probably guess that in Japan people drive on the left side of the road and stand on the left side of the escalator (while everyone passes you on the right). Now, it usually only takes a couple of times of walking "upstream" for you to realize that you're walking on the wrong side, ...

This, my friends, is a story about a molehill that turned in to a mountain. It all started innocently enough: a family friend met up with someone for lunch. Hours later, however, she went out to her driveway and realized that her car was not in the driveway. She was more than a little alarmed about this sudden turn of events, and she realized, in hindsight, that the dog had been barking an unusual amount in the moments before. Aw, crap. She hunted around in the nearby area, but the car was nowhere to be seen. In a sign of our times, she took to social media to try to get help. She alerted all of her friends that the car was missing, and she provided the make and model of the car. If any of them saw the car, she asked them to alert her and the police, so that the car could be retrieved. It's one of the quickest ways to cast an informal APB, so I immediately understood why she did this. Of course, there were a few laments about the sad turn of events. Now, this next part is where...

I know enough about my car to take care of minor repairs with it: I can change tires, change windshield wipers, swap out headlights or fuses, and swap out the suspension. I still don't know enough to take care of anything major, though, so I don't try. When it comes to things like the transmission or the electrical system as a whole, I take it to the professionals. I kinda sorta need those to run well, and I'd rather not learn the hard way that I made a mistake when working on one of those systems. So, when the taillight indicator on the dashboard came on, I started by checking it wasn't one of the little things I could fix. After all, if it was just a blown out bulb, I could fix that myself. First, though, I needed to figure out which light was acting up, so I could investigate further. There, however, was the rub. I couldn't tell which light was problematic. My brake lights all turned on, the turn signals blinked just fine, and the reverse lights turned on as ...