Any school teacher can tell you: you get a sixth sense for when the kids are getting in trouble behind your back. When I was in third grade, our teacher used to tell us that she had eyes in the back of her head, which was obviously not true (we had just had a lot of classes offering surprising discoveries about the human anatomy, but that wasn't one of them.) When one of us was getting ready to fuck around, though, she knew.
At the time, we didn't really understand that the pattern-matching abilities of the human mind can easily find any abnormalities. If you've got a cat, for instance, you can probably sense when that little shit is trying to steal Twinkies off the counter (I told you no, Bilby.) Work as a mini golf supervisor, you can make a pretty educated guess about which group of teens is going to throw your clubs in the water feature. And if you drive a total shitbox like me, you can tell right away when something isn't right, even if you don't know what it is.
Let me provide an example. Last month, I was heading down the highway, doing my periodic flooring-it exercises to pass everyone that was going slower than Mach 8. This kind of strain challenges every mechanical item in the car, which is why I subject it to the intense maintenance regimen described as "don't." Suddenly, I could sense that the car was down on power, that it was unhappy with some shenanigan or even shenanigans that I had been commanding it to perform in recent memory. Rather than push it, I trusted my gut and pulled off to the nearest rest stop to take a look and see what went wrong.
Indeed, it was something not very obvious: my right rear door had fallen off at super-highway speed and was left behind several kilometres down the Trans-Canada. Something subtle like this is easy to miss if you don't pick up on the little clues that your car offers from time to time. I popped a u-ey, went back to get what was left of the door, and ratchet-strapped it back onto the car. If I hadn't noticed, I would have had to buy another door from the junkyard. It pays to pay attention.
