Welcome to Episode #114 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Driving Without Brakes.”

I’ve done some stupid things in my life… but driving without brakes may be the stupidest!

Of course, I didn’t plan on putting myself (and everybody on the road around me!) in danger, but it also wasn’t a big surprise. Nope! I’m ashamed to admit that I had ignored the warning signs for months before experiencing the terrifying consequences.

I hope that by sharing this embarrassing story of bad decisions and misguided priorities, you can avoid creating unnecessary terror in your life.

This incident truly scared me straight and changed my life for the better… I hope it might change you a little, too.

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To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Driving Without Brakes

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

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As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

TRANSCRIPT

Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #114 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

I will apologize up front, in case you hear any construction noise, we’ve got some work going on next door. They’ve got radio blasting, hammering, sawing, yelling.

So, let this be the first message of the day. You can’t always wait for perfect conditions to do things. Do the best you can with what you’ve got. And this is what I’ve got today.

What else do I have today? Well, not just that message. I’ve got a story for you. This is a terrible story. And by terrible, I mean full of terror. My own personal terror.

You probably won’t care. But this is a story that was a real horror for me. And it’s also very embarrassing because it was completely my own fault. But it did happen over 30 years ago. So I am prepared to forgive myself, especially if sharing this horrific story can in some way help you avoid a similar mistake.

So let me hit you with this story. Prepare. And then I’ve got three quick lessons that I drew from it. And maybe one of them will make sense to you, too. All right, ready?

I was 16 years old. This is 16 year old Ando. Had just gotten my driver’s license. Didn’t have a car.

I was holding out, saving up for some type of sporty coupe. But that plan never worked out. Instead, a kindly neighbor had an old Buick station wagon that she no longer required. And I picked it up for I think $600.

That was my first car. Dark blue, red leather-ish interior. And like most older cars, there were some tricks to operating it.

It had a window that you had to kind of jimmy a little bit to get to work. And yes, it was an old-fashioned window, not an electric window.

There was some smoke coming out of the tailpipe and the carburetor was tricky. It had some type of the butterfly valve on top where you had to use a twist tie once the car got running in the cold weather, you have to go out and tie it open.

So there were some tricks to keeping it moving, but I didn’t care. It was my car. This was freedom. This was my chariot of independence.

So there I was, a young driver, and I got a couple years out of that thing, at least a year and a half, two years, but I had no money. So I wasn’t one of those kinds of people who could soup up the car or trick it out in any kind of way.

I had no money and, of course, no mechanical knowledge. That’s the other big part of that. And no friends who had any mechanical knowledge. So anything that was wrong with that car stayed wrong or got worse. In most cases got worse, which brings us to this horrific story.

One day, I hit the brakes and heard a squeak. And as I learned, that might be an early sign that your brakes are starting to go. You might need to replace those. But I had more important things to do and they were still working, so I didn’t think too much about it.

But as time went on, and this is one of those things that you don’t really notice right away because it’s so gradual, but at some point I noticed that I was really having to press the pedal deeper than I used to. Instead of just touching the brakes, you would have to get it half an inch, maybe then to an inch, an inch and a half. You had to press more and more.

Until eventually, and here we’re getting into the embarrassing part, I had to press that pedal all the way to the floor. Not only did I have to press it all the way to the floor, I found myself having to turn in my seat, jam my heel down into it and use the back of my chair to kind of add extra leverage to really depress that pedal and pin it to the floor to get any kind of breaking reaction out of it.

Now again, I’m going to just claim that I was young, poor and stupid. That’s what makes this so embarrassing. I just thought I could get by. It seemed like I had more important things to do.

I was able to drive. I was functioning. I actually developed a whole technique where I didn’t really use the brakes that much.

Instead of speeding off to destinations, I would just take my time and if I looked up ahead and I saw that there was some braking going on, I would just start coasting. And I always gave myself a big cushion of space around the car, which is good defensive driving anyway. And I found that I could just kind of stay in this bubble and time myself to get from place to place.

So it’s crazy how you can adapt to things you shouldn’t have to adapt to. I shouldn’t even have had to develop that skill. And it didn’t last that long because ultimately, here’s what happened.

Heading to Taekwondo class. I think it was like a seven o’clock class across town. I’m driving myself to class because I’m a big boy.

I head out and this is all happening within a block or two of my house. I head out and the first turn I need to make is a left into a two-lane road. One lane coming, one lane going.

So I time it, there’s a space, I roll out into traffic, I’m heading towards an intersection. Up ahead, I see the light turn red, there’s five or six cars because it’s basically, I mean, it’s a seven o’clock class, so there’s a lot of traffic on the road. This is basically rush hour.

I need to stop. I turn in my chair, I jam my heel down to the ground, I start pressing… and on this day, no reaction whatsoever from the car. No braking response. I am rolling unhindered.

Calculating very quickly, I realize I’m going to smash into the back of those cars. There was not enough room to coast, there was not enough time to wait for that light to turn green. This was bad. So I swerve into the oncoming lane.

First miracle. I didn’t hit anybody, didn’t run into anything. I get into the oncoming lane, but I can’t stay there for long because now there’s cars making their right hand turns up there and whatever they’re doing, left hand turns.

So I get right past the residential portion and there’s a gas station on the corner. I get out of the incoming lane and I make it to the edge of the parking lot of the gas station. I roll into the gas station, still going full speed.

Second miracle. There is an opening to get through the parking lot around the gas pumps to get to the far side of the gas station. So I’m thinking, great, I can just kind of let this slow down.

And as I round the corner of the gas station on the far edge, I see an air pump, right? And behind it is a high curb, maybe like six inches high. Behind that, there’s a big row of like seven or eight foot high hedge