I think I need a word with someone at the Toyota parts and service department.

I was driving home from work yesterday in the rain. I was frustrated as it was, I knew I had to take the long way since the bridge on my usual route often floods. I figured I could suck up the extra 10 minutes and deal. The rain started to pick up a bit, so I turned the windshield wipers up a notch. Ahh, that was better...at least for a moment, until I heard an almost cartoonish mechanical malfunction noise (like what you would hear in a movie when someone jams a stick into the robot's gears and it dies).

"REEEeeaaaaarrrrrr" <--I think it went something like that.

Anyway, I looked over to the right of my windshield, and to my astonishment, the wipers had completely intertwined themselves. How the nut does that happen? They are two separate entities, on two life paths, each doing a separate job for the common good of clean and dry windshieldery. How is this even possible?? I couldn't pull over immediately to check it out. Apparently, in Rocky Hill, NJ, there are NO shoulders on any of the streets. I ended up practically parking in someone's yard. I turned off the wipers, got out and began the untangling process. Let me tell you, those bad boys were STUCK. I mean, really stuck together. One was wilting over and stuck through one of the openings in the other one. I don't know how it got in, because I couldn't wriggle the thing looser OR tighter. I felt like no matter what I did, I just kept making it worse. I'm also pretty sure I heard the wipers laugh at me.

Keep in mind, I was getting rained on...hard.

I had to muster up every ounce of strength I had to untangle these things...which may have been too much strength, because I nearly broke them apart. I noticed one of the blades was now bent and loose on the end, but the wipers themselves looked pretty much normal. So, I got back in the car and re-powered the wipers. The good news is that they were no longer stuck together. The bad news is that they were now at completely different speeds. I had the wiper power on medium-slow. The left wiper appeared to be doing turbo mach 3 speed, and the right one was like watching an elderly woman run a 400 meter dash: sluggish and confused (and sexy). Oh, and remember that robot noise I told you about earlier? Yeah it was back. Only this wasn't the "robot dying" noise, it was the "holy shit, someone messed with the robot control panel and now its blood-thirsty and heading for the orphanage!" noise. I ended up turning the wipers off altogher, and almost died several times on the (long) way home.

I think windsheild wipers are the kind of thing where you don't know what you've got 'til its gone. Only, I did know what I had before it was gone, and loosing it sucked as much as I expected it to! What are the odds that yesterday gave us the only rain of the season...anyone?