Blondstar: Thinking inside the box

My beautiful new yellow Honda Jazz RS has various high-tech features that were not present on my previous 10-year-old model. These include “keyless entry with remote central locking and immobiliser” which, despite studying the manual, I have found hard to understand. Judging by the posts on the internet forums for Jazz owners I am not alone in this. I read one story about a person being locked out of their car after leaving the keys inside.

After returning from a drive one night, my husband and I had only just got out of the parked car when I decided to go back and move it forward, to make more room for a neighbour’s vehicle. Leaving my husband to wait on the pavement holding my handbag, which contained the key, I popped back in and repositioned the car slightly. I switched off the engine and opened the door, but heard a series of alarming bleeps. I concluded that I should not have been driving without having the key with me. I retrieved it from my handbag and attempted to lock the car but this did not work. Then I tried various things which made the situation worse: the side lights and all internal lights came on and I could not switch them off, nor could I start the engine, and the bleeping continued whenever I opened the door. It was getting late and I dared not leave the vehicle unlocked overnight with its battery running down. I rang the AA.

The AA officer arrived by midnight, having had a long journey from another part of Auckland, and informed me that I had left the vehicle in Drive instead of Park. He was admirably kind and polite, but I was mortified and felt like an elderly version of Blondstar. Because of my fixed assumption that the problem involved the “keyless entry with remote central locking and immobiliser”, I had never thought to check for other obvious explanations.

How many mistakes, misunderstandings and lost opportunities result from being stuck in a certain mindset and failing to consider the alternatives? For example I have known several people whose serious medical conditions – for example brain tumour, Parkinson’s disease, hypothyroidism – remained undiagnosed until a late stage, because their symptoms were assumed to be due to a recurrence of the depression from which they had suffered in the past. Conclusions based on past experience, preconceived beliefs or assumptions are often correct but sometimes not, so it is a good idea to think “laterally” or “outside the box”.

Incidentally my Jazz was back in good form the day after its traumas.