When my dad came to live with us in his last days, walking had gotten hard, so he wanted a motorized scooter. He was quite a character, and a scooter suited him.

An hour after it arrived, something on it caught the edge of my sofa. Dad didn't notice. He drove on through the house, and the couch came with him.

The next day the same piece of the scooter raked along a whole row of kitchen cabinets and left a gash across every face, perfectly even, like it had been drawn with a ruler. I stood there doing the math. He'd had the thing a few hours. At this rate, by tomorrow I'd be looking at six figures in damage.

So I banned it.

He cheated. He used it behind my back. And one day we heard a sonic boom from his end of the house. He had driven it into his bathroom cabinets and shattered the mirror above them, a mirror the size of a mural.

After that he got the memo and parked it for good.

Here's what I learned, and it isn't what you'd think. It isn't about bumpers, and it isn't about taking the scooter away.

A motorized scooter has a far more powerful engine than anyone would guess. It glides across the floor so smoothly and quietly that nothing about riding it tells you how much force is under the seat. Not the driver, not the people watching. You find out from the gash in the cabinets.

The danger is the power in the hands of an oblivious driver.

I thought of Dad's scooter the morning I found my vault garbled. A one-line script, written to tidy things up, had run twice. Each run took a second and ended with one cheerful word: done. In those two seconds it had damaged around a hundred and fifty files.

Nothing about running it felt like driving a couch through the house. That's the point. The smoothness hides the power.

So now, before anything in my studio is allowed to write to a file, the driver has to know the engine: how far this command reaches, what it's dragging, what's behind it when it stops. Then look back and check.

Dad would have hated that rule. He'd have followed it, though, eventually. Right after the mirror.

Made in the dyad: the story and the lesson, MargaretAnne Saizan / MythTemple · drafted by Claude (Claude Code), from her telling of 2026-09-25.

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