my car confuses me

There I was, this morning, driving along in extremely cold weather, la la la, everything’s fine.

Then I realize: THERE’S A WEIRD SYMBOL ON MY DASH DISPLAY. Crisis! My brain started going round and round in this little panic circle. How long has the light been on? The car just got inspected! Maybe they broke something! Maybe it’s just cold? What does that symbol even mean? Should I pull over?

Unfortunately, I was only about five minutes into my 30-minute trip when I noticed the light, so I had a while to fret about it. I went through this calming mental checklist more than a few times:

-the car is not on fire
-the car is not overheating
-my rpm indicator goes up and down in response to my actions, as does the speedometer
-I’m not out of gas
-the NEW SCARY LIGHT is not red, nor is it blinking, counting down, or getting bigger (all good signs!)
-no one is honking or flashing their lights as I drive by them

In this state of semi-controlled WTF is happening, I made it to work (okay, Panera, but work was next!), where I spent a while flipping through my car manual to find the warning lights page.

IT WASN’T ON THERE!!! Gah! WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, I asked myself. And it’s not like the manual is laid out in a way that makes any sense to me. It’s probably written for people who understand something about cars, aka ‘not me.’

Finally, I found another page with pictures on it. For reference, here is the indicator light I was seeing:

Yeah. For those of you who *aren’t* laughing yet, turns out that’s the ‘hey, your cruise control light is on’ indicator. I must have hit it with my giant mittens when I was turning the car on. On the plus side, crisis averted! Car not broken!

On the downside, that’s kind of embarrassing. (To be fair, my last car just plastered the word CRUISE up on the dash when cruise control was on.)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.