Yesterday there was 6 inches of snow on the ground with weather conditions worsening every minute, but I still insisted on driving to Kinkos because I’m a man.
I left work with all of my documents on hand to give to Mr. Kinko and I took extra care to make sure that nothing was ruined by the snow. I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot with super-duper amounts of carefulness. To make sure that I was extra-safe, I activated the traction control and “snow mode” on Goldie (my car).
After five minutes of driving at 11mph, I figured that I’d kick things up a notch and drive at 15mph. Two minutes later…20mph because I’m a man.
Things were going well and the road was semi-isolated, so I decided to turn off snow-mode and drive at regular speed because I’m a man. Approximately three seconds after flipping the snow switch, the back of my car made a hard right turn and Goldie began to spin out of control. Instead of panicking, I calmly tried to regain control, but suddenly I heard a beeping sound from the dashboard, which was swiftly followed by the message “ABORT VEHICLE! ABORT VEHICLE NOW! GOLDIE GON’ DIE!” (or maybe it said “traction lost,” but it all meant the same thing to me).
The car was sliding sideways up a hill at around 5mph and heading for a lamppost at the side of the road and there was nothing that I could do about it. But just when I was ready to swan-dive out of the sunroof, the car came to a complete halt. I evaluated my situation and noticed that I was about an inch from the curb and about six inches from the post.
I learned the tough way that when they wrote “snow mode” they really mean it, and I shouldn’t ignore it even if I’m a man.