What I Did To Prevent A Car Accident

Something pretty scary happened to me while I was driving this weekend.

I was driving down a main road, went to accelerate, and the car wouldn't stop accelerating.  I tapped on the brakes, nothing.  I tapped some more...nothing.  I started to panic and FLOORED the brakes, nope.  The car is slowing down slightly, but STILL GOING!!!

Now, I'm panicking.  All I can think of is the car that got recalled for accelerating all on it's own and causing accidents.  Remember that?  So as I'm panicking, I trying think as clearly as possible on what to do to keep from going off the road or crashing into something!  So, I pull up the emergency brake.  Still, the car continues to go!  Now I am breathing heavy and surely having some form of a panic attack.

Finally, I am able to get the car to the side of a side street, and it's still going!!!  I look down, thinking 'did I kick this thing into another gear by accident?'  Nope.  So it finally dawned on me to put that sucker in park and turn it off.  I didn't think of that because I was so scared, and also because I was afraid of messing up the transmission.  Thankfully, that did the trick!  The car FINALLY stopped!!

I just sat there for a second, crying, because I was so scared and now so stressed.  I didn't know what was going on with my car, and I really thought I was going to have to crash into something to get it to stop.  Thankfully, I didn't have to do that.

So I called my husband, while still crying and upset.  He thought I had gotten into an accident.  I explained that I hadn't, but the only words that would come out of my mouth were "the car wouldn't stop!  it wouldn't stop!!"  I was a disaster.

Together, we figured out what happened.  My lovely floor mat came unsnapped up front and somehow lodged itself under my gas pedal!  So every time I hit the brake, the gas was also being hit simultaneously by my flippin' floor mat!!

I can't believe that a misplaced floor mat gave me all that trouble!  I took that stupid thing out and flung it into the backseat.  I'm pretty sure I can avoid that disaster in the future if I refuse to have any rugs near the foot pedals!  Whew!