Slippery Foot

Something real bad happened to me tonight as I was leaving work. Heavy rain was falling for most of the evening. When I dashed outside to Autumn's car, I was soaked. Climbing inside her Honda I slammed the door and rushed to get it started and turn on the heater. After I fiddled around with the heater controls I put the car into gear and headed out of the parking lot. Hardly any cars were around so I weaved through empty rows of parking spaces picking up speed as I did so. Reaching the perimeter road I took a left and shifted through first and second gear.

Depressing the clutch pedal while simultaneously shoving the stick towards third, my foot slipped off the clutch like I had just stepped onto a sheet of ice. I wasn't ready to release the pedal yet and I had the shifter somewhere near third, but not all the way in place. There was a loud mettallic noise followed by grinding. Then a final bang startled me as a large piece of gear slammed into the transmission housing and sounded like a church bell. It was probably a tooth exploding off of a gear in the transmission. I was mortified and in shock.

Pulling off to the side of the pavement with the engine still running I turned on a dome light and tried to look down at the pedal to see if it had broken. The rubber pad was glistening shiny black with water. Must have been from the bottom of my shoe and that's what caused my foot to glide off the pedal. I couldn't think of anything to do for the car except see if it still shifted properly. Very carefully I put the car into first through fourth driving towards the factory front gate. Everything seemed fine, but I had a sinking feeling there was a bunch of metal fragments floating around in the gear oil. It would probably chew the transmission to bits in no time at all.

I don't know what to do about this, I'm so lame. Autumn's gonna kill me.