Every spring when the weather finally turns warm in Michigan, I think of this story.
Back when I was in high school, my friend Jim and I were driving to a place we weren’t familiar with. Since this was before smart phones and we didn’t know exactly where we were going, we of course had printed off directions from MapQuest ahead of time. On paper! We would reference the MapQuest directions occasionally, then place the sheet of paper on the dashboard until it was needed again.
At some point, we realized that the weather was warm enough that we should roll down the windows to get a nice breeze in the car. “Roll down the windows and turn up the tunes” as the kids say.
You can probably guess what happened next. Our printed directions were almost immediately sucked off the dashboard into the cabin of the car. Our only way of knowing where we were going and where we had been began swirling around in a tornado of chaos. We both grabbed furiously at the paper, trying to pin it to some solid surface, lest it blow out the window and leave us stranded out in god knows where.
After a few chaotic seconds, Jim was able to successfully secure the paper and I rolled our windows back up. The fact that the directions hadn’t flown out the window and that I hadn’t driven off the side of the road was a minor miracle. It was only in hindsight, after I played the scene back to myself in my mind that I realized the comedically genius thing that Jim had shouted in the middle of the chaos. It still makes me laugh to this day.
”GOD DAMN YOU Bernoulli!”
