What to Do If Your Brakes Fail
What to do if your brakes fail. The first thing (and the best thing) you can do during the proposed brake failure is PRAY! The following prayer is recommended and should be memorized before your next scheduled brake failure. This prayer is taken directly from the Mechanics and Technician’s Common Book of Prayer. The slight spelling irregularities are to help with the pronouncement peculiarities. So when you discover yourself in a car careening wildly down the road, you pray as follows:
“ Our maiighty faahhther, I beseechest thou: Rememberest thou this, thine ‘umble servant, and render him or her your providential assistance during this turbulent time of uncontrolled forward vehicular momentum, and suppliest unto this, thine ‘umble servant a soft place to guide this, thine ‘umble servant’s conveyance unto so that all excess inertial energy mightest be expended harmlessly in the mud rather than ‘gainst a bridge abutment of evil. Amennnn.”
The way this prayer is actually pronounced during the actual brake failure is as follows:
“ AAAAAauugggghhh! Ooooooogggghhhh! Eeeeeeeek! Help me God!”
Either way, God knows what you mean.
The next step which occurs simultaneously with the prayer so it’s not exactly a “next” step, but indeed more like a parallel step, in that is occurs not after but…..uh, lets move on.
This next step consists of looking desperately for something soft to stop the runaway car with. Utility poles, rocks, mountains and bridge piers are not soft. They hurt badly enough when you walk into them (just try it sometime, if you don’t believe me). They will hurt a LOT if you drive into them. Swamps are better.
Swamps are soft and mucky and don’t hurt as much as they smell. But what if there isn’t a swamp handy? It is a good idea to have a swamp with you to throw out in front of your car during a brake crisis. I keep swamp in my car behind the front seat. Most people simply choose to see my car as being messy, but truth is, that’s my emergency swamp back there, carefully prepared and maintained where it is handy. In the event of a brake failure on a swamp-deficient (sorry, that should be swamp-challenged) stretch of road, I simply grab my portable folding handi-swamp and hurl it in front of the car to stop it. That’s the theory anyway. I don’t have the hurling part worked out yet, and sometimes I can’t find the swamp because of all that other stuff back there behind the seat. In that event, I substitute the portable emergency sanitary landfill I keep behind the passenger seat for such emergency emergencies.
Another task to be done during a brake failure is to warn the other drivers what is going on. The problem is compounded in area like where we live, where many of the other drivers are idiots who graduated ‘magna too loud’ from Rude School. Thus, the way they normally drive is indistinguishable from the way a car with no operating brakes is driven. So it is that your brakelessness may look like normal driving behavior and not be noted by other drivers. They can be warned by the use of your car’s horn, flashing lights, flares, fireworks, newspaper advertisements, etc.
I prefer to use scent warnings. I simply pee my pants at the other drivers (something which is happening involuntarily anyway) and the effect is the same (in theory) as a male dog marking his territory. I (in theory) scent mark the entire lane ahead (in theory) as being; MINE! MINE! MINE! Not because I am trying to dominate anybody, but because my car has: NO BRAKES! NO BRAKES! NO BRAKES!
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