Deborah Hill Cone: I'm driving myself to distraction

If you get into a bit of grief behind the wheel it might be because your mind has headed off in a different direction.

I may be a class traitor but my Mercedes is the focus of my affections ... now if I could just focus my attention.

My gorgon-like new car broke down this week. On the school run. The shame. I put my foot right down to the floor but it would only inch along at snail's pace.

So much for its tigerish 5.5 litre engine. Type-A soccer moms behind me - the sort who you never see out of exercise gear - were beeping because I was holding them up from their coffee dates and walking their tiny, tiny, tiny dogs. Sorry ladies. That'll learn me for being a class traitor and buying a Mercedes.

I'd only had the car for two weeks and it had barely been driven before I got it; trust me to manage somehow to break it. Do feel free to indulge in uberschadenfreude. I might've been able to find out what was wrong if I could have looked at the manual, but it was in the glovebox and I couldn't open the glovebox.

Of course, the car manual might have told me how to open the glovebox, but since it was itself trapped in the glovebox ... Oh, forget it. I took the car, slowly, to the mechanic, to be "diagnosed". They had such a shiny white floor it looked like a lab in an ad. I half expected a scientist to come out with a beaker of blue liquid and announce a breakthrough in sanitary protection.

It's strange, before this happened I thought people who had a relationship with their cars were even more boring and stupid than people who talk about the colour of their splashbacks, high-status school zones or Ponsonby house prices. There was a man in my street who cleaned his car with a toothbrush; I used that guy as my jeer object for years.

But now, I take it all back. That toothbrush guy is me. I am one of those bores. I look forward to driving somewhere. I actually love my car. Still, if I don't improve my driving PDQ it won't last long. I wrote off the last one and already it only took me a week or so to drive into a kerb and munt the previously pristine wheels.

The thing is, I drove into the kerb because most of the time when I'm driving I disassociate. I frequently can't remember getting from here to there because my mind has gone away somewhere else.

Hell, it's Auckland traffic. I might be driving but I'm thinking about, say, how I must reread Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or organise a Cards Against Humanity night, or whether I will ever become like Germaine Greer and prefer gardening to sex.

Strangely, you can get a ticket for driving while talking on your cellphone or having had more than one drink, but you can't get a ticket for switching your entire conscious personality into "stand by, caller" mode. And yes, at these times, I am sober. I had never heard of disassociation until recently, but now I have become aware of it I realise how much I do it. (Yes, before you all write in, I am endeavouring to focus now while driving.)

Disassociation is considered a coping mechanism for tolerating stress, including boredom or conflict. It is a continuum: at the non-pathological end it's daydreaming while driving, say; at the other end you have what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (now Dissociative Identity Disorder) where people split off parts of themselves.

It's like that line from Remains of the Day: "You know what I'm doing? I am placing my thoughts elsewhere while you chatter away." I used to be terrible at doing it in boring meetings. "Look at those cranes, they look like they're dancing, we could apply for some New Zealand on Air funding and make a film and set it to some East European poetry."

Some scientists now have a theory of multiplicity and believe we all have multiple different selves and no single identity. This is in keeping with Carl Jung's belief single personalities don't exist. Anyway, one of my personalities went to pick up my car. It wasn't broken. I had apparently unwittingly switched on the limiter, which is a thing like cruise control, and set it so low that the car wouldn't go faster than a few kilometres an hour. At least, I think that's what the mechanic said - I kept zoning out.