Amazing Discovery of the Day

This discovery is not amazing in and of its own merit. It is amazing because I had not discovered it before.

When I first bought my car five years ago, I did not use my windshield wipers at all for six months. Living in Southern California, there was no need.

Although Northern California is no Seattle when it comes to precipitation, there is considerably more rain here during the rainy season (generally, January and February) then in Southern California, which has no rainy season to speak of. Over the last several weeks in particular, we have had more days with rain than without, or so it seems.

My car, in stereotypical German fashion, has many secondary controls that can be adjusted with a high degree of precision. For example, the wipers come with a lovely rheostatic adjustment for the intermittent feature, allowing a huge range from nearly continuous action to extremely long pauses between swipes. Most cars these days have intermittent feature plus "regular" and "fast" speeds for continuous action. What I did not know until I had to drive through a particularly dense cloudburst this morning is that the wipers on my car have not two but three "fast" speeds. Just when I thought the second "fast" speed would not be quite enough to get me through the downpour, I discovered that the wiper stalk had yet one more detent, sending the wipers into a very effective hyperdrive.

Little things like this brighten my day. For some people, it's the purr of a cat or a golden sunrise. For me, unexpected functionality of a machine is all it takes.