Like all first cars, mine was a bomb. Despite all my attempts to keep it well maintained and make it look cool, it was really just an old bucket of rattling metal.
One day I noticed something strange happening with the speedometer. It would get to around 60km/h and stay there even though I was speeding up, then all of a sudden it would whizz all the way to 120km/h before settling back on around 100 (my real speed was about 80km/h).
This happened for about a week until I got sick of it and searched the Yellow Pages for a mechanic who specialised in speedometers. I needed a specialist because there was obviously something deeply wrong with my car.
“I’m going to need a new dashboard,” I was thinking as I called the specialist, “or maybe the thing that measures how fast the wheels are spinning is wrecked and I’ll be up for thousands replacing it… I can’t afford that!”
“Your speedo needle’s bent,” said the mechanic.
“What?”
“Yeah, it’s bent forwards so as you accelerate it moves upward and gets stuck on the clear plastic cover of your dashboard.”
“Oh, that’s brilliant…”
Soon afterwards I’d bought a new speedo needle for $8.95, installed it myself and I was back on the road and loving life.
I try to remember this story every time someone asks me a run-of-the-mill question, or every time I get the urge to answer with “just google it”.
To me, the speedo issue was enormous; to the mechanic, it was simple, and it showed me how valuable it is to have someone tell me something obvious. It may be a simple, everyday solution to the specialist, but to the average man it’s sheer genius.
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image: Brian Lane Winfield Moore
