Double or Nothing?

~ Geoff Stamper

My wife and I regularly crack automobile windshields, even a back one shattered glass all over the backseat. We are both bad drivers but that cannot be the reason. We once blamed Subaru because we replaced their windshields all the time. But we crack windshields on Ford trucks and Toyota vehicles. We do not drive an excessive amount of miles. We live at the intersection of two interstate highways where we continually make wrong turns and wind up on a freeway. But we get off as soon as we find an exit. Decades ago we had flat tires but no problems with windshields. Now the frequencies are reversed. We began trading in cars with broken windshields. A dealer should get a big discount on volume. Let them replace the windshields. We now resist fixing them because the most likely time to crack a windshield is immediately after installing a new one. Jim Adams could explain the calculus behind that phenomenon. I only know that Calculus is the Greek God of Pebbles. But I digress. Both our vehicles currently have spidery cracks on the windshield. On Monday, my procrastination gamble paid off because I pocketed free money by not fixing the Toyota RAV4’s broken windshield when we first dinged it. Sure enough, a huge rocklike blob of icy snow fell from an overhanging tree like a gunshot and sent the spider lines streaking. How lucky is that? I was driving my youngest son and his daughter home from a few days at Crystal Mountain. Two days earlier on the drive up, I remarked about the dangerous missiles of snow and ice randomly bombing the highway. The only time I am ever right is when I predict bad things that happen to me.

36 thoughts on “Double or Nothing?”

  1. like the two of you, I am cursed by the god of cracked windshields and my Subaru is happy to have new updated ones more often than most. as a commuter, if I figured out the calculus it would make sense that I have a higher missile, pebble, unknown flying object going my way, but it still is super annoying and crazy. frequent cracked windshield people should get a frequent flyer discount or a punch card on replacements for sheer volume.

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  2. In Greek mythology, Kleodora or Cleodora was one of the prophetic Thriae, nymphs who divined the future by throwing stones or pebbles and were associated with the Oracle of Delphi. The Thriae were minor goddesses of the art of divinization by pebbles and of the birds of omen which were gifted to Hermes by the god Apollon. Baetylus are sacred stones that were supposedly endowed with life, or gave access to a deity. The Greeks were good at Geometry, and they learned Trigonometry when Alexander the Great went to India. Archimedes was able to use the concept of the infinitely small in a way that anticipated modern ideas of the integral calculus, but there was no Greek god named Calculus. In Latin calculus meant “pebble”. Since the Romans used pebbles to do addition and subtraction on a counting board, the word became associated with computation.
    The ancient Romans had an instrument called a hodometer, which worked in a similar principle as a taxi meter does. The Romans used the hodometer as a surveying tool for measuring distance, and it consisted of a small cart that the surveyor would push as he was measuring the distance of a road. The wheel of the cart was connected to a one-toothed gear which engaged another gear that had 399 short teeth and one long tooth on it. When the distance of one Roman Mile was reached, the long tooth on the hodometer would push a pebble into a bowl, and at the end of the day the surveyor could count the pebbles in the bowl to determine how much distance was traveled. As the wheel of the hodometer turned, the cover also revolved, dropping a pebble through a hole into bowl below.

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  4. Subaru is not alone in lawsuits about windshields. What I learned from a windshield tech is it’s more about the geometry and angle of your windshield. I drove Jeep Cherokees for years with almost flat windshields, and I replaced too many of them. I drove a Dodge with a long, sloping windshield and never replaced it. You have to admit the aerodynamics of today’s automobiles is suspect. They hit their mileage numbers by being made out of plastic, not by reducing drag.

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  6. I have cracked my share of windshields but have moved on to windshield wipers. On a good day, I can fling one of those suckers across three lanes of traffic. On a bad day it happens at a red light and everyone knows it was me.

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  7. We drive a lot of miles and encounter many, many trucks. So, stones and other paraphenalia are forever hitting our windscreens and even overtaking them is a liability in terms of what might land on the windscreen. I wince at every little chip 😂

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  13. This is really odd and strange. I can understand the ice and snow but what else could crack those windshields. You definitely could start a windshield campaign – we’re cracked and we know it. I hope you and your wife stay out of harm’s way and keep safe. 🙂

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  14. I started to think about how long it’s been since I had to replace a windshield, but then I stopped myself for fear of a jinx. If my car develops a windshield crack on the way home from work tonight, may I blame you? And may I ignore you if you refuse permission? 🙂

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