Sometimes the Obvious Answer is the Wrong Answer

Mara here:

First of all: an update from last week's blog—our WiFi is fixed and our cat's paw has healed. Hallelujah!! Small miracles.

What I didn't even bother to mention, which was happening simultaneously with all the other things last week, was that my daughter's tire pressure light came on. This is the second time this has happened in the last month.

My tire pressure light has also been regularly coming on. My daughter's car is new, so when her car's tires get low, it tells you exactly which tire and what the pressure level is. My car is not new, so all that happens is a red exclamation point lights up on the dashboard.

The first time it happened it scared me because being an older type person, the obvious reason that a red light comes on in the car is that something very bad is happening. And surely an exclamation point is important, right?

No.

After a quick Google search, I learned that the light in my make of car can indicate a number of things, but it said that the most common is low tire pressure. Okay, I can handle that.

Kind of.

Putting air in car tires is one of the mundane things that is in theory easy to do, but is not as simple as it seems. It means wrangling an industrial air pressure hose from a self-retracting reel. And then you pay $1.50 in quarters for a short amount of time in which you are supposed to be able to squirt air into all the tires.

So, if you're not experienced at doing this, you don't realize that you need to unscrew all the caps off the tires and measure the tire pressure BEFORE you put the quarters in because otherwise you waste all the valuable time you could be using to put air into the tires and then your time is up and you have to scour your car for another six quarters.

You also have to be able to accurately measure the tire pressure. I'm sure for some people this isn't hard, but I generally get a different reading every time I do it. So it's not an exact science.

But it's fine. I figure putting some air into the tires is better than nothing. Again, it's the obvious thing to do. Right?

But when it happened twice in a month, I realized that both times the tire pressure light came on was when I drove to the airport. And not just any airport—only LAX (Los Angeles' major airport).

Hmmmm.

Surely my car doesn't know it's at LAX, right? Maybe it's that LAX is further from where I go on my normal driving routines? Or maybe it's because the weight of luggage and passengers suddenly departing from the car causes the air pressure trigger to go off?

I decided to see if the light would come on when we recently made a trip to San Diego. That's a long drive. We would have extra passengers and luggage in the car. I felt pretty sure I had solved the mystery.

Nope.

The whole trip I waited for the tire pressure light to go on—but it never did.

Humph.

Okay, maybe it was just a coincidence. This year, my daughter has been doing a lot of travelling. I went years without going to LAX, but this year I've had to go multiple times. So about a couple of weeks after the San Diego trip, I once again had to drop my daughter off at the airport.

Sure enough, as I was leaving the airport, the tire pressure light came on. Whaaaaaat?

I drove home, and the next time I got in my car the light had gone off.

When it came time to go and pick her up from the airport again, I put air in my tires before I went, thinking I would head off the problem ahead of time.

I pulled into LAX and the light popped on.

What is going on? I drive all over the city every week. How is it possible my car knows it's going to LAX. That can't be right, right?

This happens another three times.

Last weekend my husband and my daughter were both out of town, so I had extra cars available to drive. I took the opportunity to take my daughter's car into the repair shop to have her tires checked. They were fine. As I picked up her car, I thought, should I ask about my car? How do I explain that the problem is my car doesn't like LAX?

I decided I didn't care if I sounded crazy. I told the man who was printing out the paperwork to release my daughter's car that I wanted to have my tires checked as well. And I sheepishly said, "So, my tire pressure light comes on, but only when I go to LAX." Then I waited.

"Just the airport?" the repair man asked.

"Yes," I answer, waiting for him to start laughing.

"Do you have a Nissan?" he asked.

"Yes," I reply.

"Well, Nissans are known to have sensitive radio transmission sensors. When you get around a lot of other cars, it will pick up their signals and cause your sensors to go off."

Ohhhhhhhhhh. Relief.

Okay, so I wasn't totally crazy. It was related to going to the airport. It was not my car having an emotional reaction to the airport, which, of course, as a human with no mechanical knowledge is the only thing I could conceive of.

Problem solved.

And while having a car with an aversion to going to LAX would have been a fun anecdote to talk about at parties, it was a relief to know that my car wasn't having mechanical problems. And it was a good reminder that there are often logical explanations for things—even when we can't understand them.

Here's what I asked my mom about this:

Have you ever struggled to solve a problem because you couldn't get past the seemingly obvious answer?

So many times! Here's the latest one I can remember. A few years ago, your Dad came home and told me that seven (yes, seven) warning lights had lit up on the dashboard of our Honda van. I couldn't believe that he'd continued to drive the car. I would have pulled over immediately, afraid the thing would explode if I didn't turn the engine off immediately!

He did take it to our Honda mechanic. As he drove off, I thought, "This is going to be thousands of dollars worth of work." But when he came home, he said the guy told him that it was just a glitch on the computer board. They could fix it for a few thousand dollars, but he said there was no reason to spend the money. We could just live with the irritation.

So my obvious answer to what to do when all those lights came on ("Stop the car and exit it immediately!") was the wrong one. We don't have that car anymore but I always wondered whenever I drove it, "What if one of the things that the glowing warning light refers to is actually malfunctioning? How would I know?" The answer was (I guess) that I wouldn't know, but nobody—neither your Dad nor the mechanic—were concerned about it. We both drove that car for years with the dashboard lights "screaming" at us that everything appeared to be wrong with the car!