You remember a while back I wrote about the importance of redundancy?  Well, here’s a story that will emphasize the importance of it in a harmless yet illustrative fashion.  It start with an automobile, kinda like this one:

My girlfriend and I were going to take her car up to Flagstaff a few weekends ago to get out of the heat.  We figured it would be fun to go to the mountains, drop the top, and drive in the cool pines for a while.  It didn’t happen that way because of a little mistake that caused unnecessary stress and frustration.  Thankfully, the story has a happy ending…but let me describe what happened first.

Its a Saturday morning and we are getting ready to leave.  As we are preparing to load her car, both of us notice that the keys to the Mazda are nowhere to be found.  When she purchased the car, she only received one key from the dealer.  This wasn’t a problem…until now.  For the next three hours we searched in vain for the key, we even drove to a Mazda dealer to attempt to get a duplicate key.  Because of the programming of the key however, even if we were able to purchase one, it would have required programming to start the car.  We decided that since we couldn’t find the key it was best to take my car and salvage what we could out of the weekend.

My girlfriend and I were stressed, both of us were frustrated at the situation and each other.  The looming problem was getting her car working so she could get to work on Monday and the expense of getting her car operational again.  She was looking at several hundred dollars out of pocket to resolve the situation.  Having a second key would have prevented all of this, which is why locksmiths recommend you have at least two keys for each automobile.

Despite the rocky start to our weekend, we had a great time in Flagstaff.  Both of us needed time to relax and we took advantage of the cool weather to be outside and active.  As the weekend drew to a close though and we started heading back to Phoenix, the question of what to do about the missing keys came up.  We decided to do one last search together to see if we could find the one and only set of keys.

…and we found them.

Luckily, it took us only about five minutes of searching before we recovered the keys and breathed huge sighs of relief.  Later that week, she got a second set of keys so this wouldn’t happen again.  Both of us were glad things turned out alright in the end, but the moral to this story is to have two of everything you might need.  Redundancy comes in handy both during emergencies and in weekend getaways.