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Writer's pictureTommy Sangchompuphen

Planning for the Unplanned

I currently live in Dayton but work in Knoxville. That’s been the setup since 2018 when I left my teaching position in Tennessee for a position in Ohio in 2017, only to return to my previous employer in Tennessee a year later.

By my count, I’ve completed 346 legs of the Ohio-to-Tennessee roundtrip commute, amassing 103,108 miles, since 2018.


I’ve spun-out on an icy interstate. I’ve hydroplaned in heavy rains. I’ve been stuck in standstill traffic for nearly five hours in a winter storm. I've managed to avoid several collisions. And I’ve witnessed numerous accidents and recoveries along the I-75 route.


But I’ve never had a mechanical problem with my car … until yesterday. After putting more than 100,000 miles on a car that now has a total of 252,000 miles, my 2011 Hyundai Sonata has always been reliable on my interstate commute between Ohio and Tennessee. I try to keep the car well-maintained given its heavy use.


When calculating when I need to arrive someplace, I consider traffic, construction, time of day, and, of course, the need to take the requisite pit stops. But worrying about whether the trusty Hyundai will make the long haul isn’t usually a concern.


You can imagine I was surprised yesterday when the engine light came on with less than an hour from my destination. The problem prevented me to accelerate and caused the car to sputter at times, making the final hour of the trip about 30 minutes longer. I was slightly late for a meeting as a result.


The fix was rather easy and relatively quick. The ignition coil and a single spark plug needed to be replaced. But it wasn’t something I had built into my schedule.


Luckily, the meeting that I was late for wasn’t career-dependent, unlike what many of you might experiencing with this week’s bar examination.


So if you’re driving to the examination site this week, make sure you consider all contingencies and worst-case scenarios (even if they were never problems previously) and build time into your commute so that unanticipated problems don’t prevent you from taking the bar exam.


Better yet—consider staying at the exam site and take the driving variables out of the equation.

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