The Broken Car

My son broke our car this morning.  He did.  I swear it.  I opened the door and let the children climb in and I was about to get them strapped into their car seats when I realized I needed to run back into the house to get something I'd forgotten.  "They'll be all right," I thought to myself as I walked off.   My daughter is at the age where connecting things, especially lap belts, is her passion.  My son, on the other hand, likes buttons.  Oh, and he wants to drive the car.

I get back in short order to find my daughter still working on "clicking" the belts and my son happily in the drivers seat with the hazard lights on.  He's probably pressed other buttons but as the car is off and there's no key in sight, he can't have done much harm.  Or can he?

I get him out and put him in his car seat and then I push the button to have the door shut and nothing happens.  That's odd.  Well, let me grab the door handle, that will surely make it go.  But no, the door was dead.  Okay, not to worry, let me get my daughter in her seat and I'll worry about this in a minute.  I go to the drivers seat and press the buttons to open the back sliding doors and now I'm surprised, because those buttons aren't working either.

I try and open the driver's side sliding door, which had been shut all along and couldn't have been messed with by my son to find I had to manually open and pull it back.  I discovered the door was both heavy and had a lot of inertia once I got it sliding.  So, two children in car seats, two sliding doors not functioning.  I manually close both and we head off to school.

Is there any chance this is a battery issue?  I wasn't gone for long enough to drain enough power, but he did press a lot of buttons and the hazards were blinking furiously when I returned?  To check, I stopped the car, turned it off and back on and still no power to the back doors.

For part of this time I had a suspicion about what had happened.  My son, in his eagerness to drive the car, pushed every button trying to find the on switch.  There must be some button I don't know about.  Some button that must clearly be labeled "if you want to disable useful functionality and break your back doors, just press here."  So where was this button?

As I'm driving I look all around.  There are so many buttons on cars today.  I found two buttons, nay features, I never even noticed before--features I intend on using in the future because they are in the "useful" category unlike whatever button my son has hit.

I saw a television show once about how our brain works, specifically how we deal with large volumes of information at a time.  The specific example was how we manage to find the items we need in a grocery store.  Our brains, out of necessity, ignore much of the information around us so that we can focus on the task at hand.  Have you been in a store, looking for item X on row Y and you can't see it for the life of you?  You look up and down, left and right, and it turns out it was right in front of you, at eye-level when the associate shows you where it is?  That's our brain's amazing capability to filter in action.

On that particular show, they showed how this works with some extreme examples.  They had shoppers looking for food in the canned vegetables aisle.  Right in the middle, very clear to see, there was a little area with pints of milk.  People would look up and down the rows, find what they needed and then move on.  When asked if they noticed anything unusual about the area they were just shopping in, they didn't remember anything.  When they were shown the milk, they were surprised they didn't see it.

So, with that knowledge, I knew finding this button my son had pushed was going to be challenging.  My brain was already ignoring things it didn't think I needed to know about so I had to focus very hard on looking at the mundane, the known, the oh wait, I'm driving.  Yes, yes, I was safe and prudent as I went through my visual search.  (There are lots of lights on the way to school and most of them seemed to be red when we got to them.)

Eventually, when we were almost at school I found it.  Where was it?  It was an on/off toggle right above the two buttons that open the back doors.  It was right where it should have been because it was related to those two buttons.  But since I knew what those two buttons did, I ignored the surrounding area.  I didn't even see that toggle switch there.

I wonder how he'll break the car the next time and what features I'll find as a result?

The Big Boy Update:  We were getting ready to go after two hours at the pool yesterday.  We were just about to head out when we heard a splash and turned around.  My son had jumped straight in.  Daddy hopped in after him and pulled him up.  He was flustered, but not overly panicked.  We talked about how it was important for him to wait for an adult to be in the pool before he got in.  That's when he decided he wanted to be a big boy like daddy so he could learn how to swim.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We have a naked baby doll (one of those that looks like a real baby) that our friends children have grown out of.  Both children like "the baby" but my daughter decided she wanted to go to sleep hugging it the other night on her chest.  I almost woke her up taking a picture when the flash went off.

Fitness Update:  After a week away from the gym doing other fitness activities, we went back this morning.  Another neighbor wants to go see Don.  He's getting quite popular in our neighborhood.

Someone Once Said:  The artist is two-thirds artisan and the artisan has essentially the same creative urge as the artist.