Surprise Morning...

NOTE:  I thought I had posted this on Friday, but my home internet connection has been buggy lately (as usual, really), and I guess something must've gone wrong, because I just noticed today that this post wasn't actually on the blog.  Everything seemed to go fine when I posted it, there were no signs of problems, but there it was this morning, still marked as "Draft."  So, anyways, here it is now, a few days late.

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One exit away from work this morning, there was a loud BANG! from my engine, and smoke started pouring out from under my car.  (It's so weird, it seems like every time I've broken down in the last 5 years, I've been one exit away from my work, in this same spot.)  I pulled over to the side of the road, got out to look under the hood, and saw oil just pouring out from the underside of my car and pooling all over the road.

Wonderful.

Called AAA, and had them send out a tow-truck.  Got to spend a thrilling hour on the shoulder of 270 waiting for the truck to arrive, praying not to get plowed into by a fellow commuter doing 80mph in an Escalade.  The tow-truck finally showed up and gave me a lift back to the dealership, thirty miles away, dragging my poor, broken car behind.  Along the way, the greasy, 300 lbs. driver regaled me with tales of all the 19- and 20-year old "hippie chicks" he's "banging" right now.

This car is only a little over a year old.  It's still under warranty.  (Thankfully.)  And I just brought it in for maintenance a couple of weeks ago, just before our Thanksgiving trip to Pittsburgh.  So this shouldn't have happened.

Turns out that when they changed my oil back then, they didn't put the oil plug back into the oil pan properly.  As I've been driving it since then, the plug has been slowly working its way out.  The explosion I heard this morning was the plug shooting out of the oil pan like a bullet.

Luckily, an easy fix.  Just get a new plug, and fill the thing back up with oil.  And a free fix, too.  Still, though - not the way I would've preferred to spend my day.

But a useful reminder that we can never get complacent, because despite our assumptions, we can never really know what's going to happen to us next.