Today I was driving on the freeway and couldn’t avoid driving over a flattened cardboard box. I looked in my rearview mirror waiting for it to fly out behind me but it never did. Great, I was driving down the freeway with a box stuck to my car.

It reminds me of one day—and this is a true story—when I was a teenager. A friend and I were driving and we came up behind a woman driving really slow on a street where we couldn’t pass. We were stuck behind her.

We both stared at the woman’s head for a minute because something was definitely strange. We then realized that what we thought was her head was actually just her hair in a big head-shaped ball. Right below that, barely peering over the dashboard was this old woman’s real head.

Needless to say, that really got us laughing. Oh yeah and she had left her turn blinker on.

So here we are driving slowly behind this very short old woman with her hair so big it looks like a second head, with her blinker on. Then there’s us following behind in the next car laughing so hard we start making snorting sounds.

Then something incredible happens. A truck pulled in front of her that was loaded with a bunch of furniture and as it sped up a mattress caught the wind and flew up into the air, flipped a few times, then landed flat in the middle of the road.

We sat there and watched as the short-old-big-hair-blinking lady drove right over the mattress and it stuck underneath her car! So now she’s driving with her blinker on, barely looking over the dashboard, with this big hair head thing and a mattress dragging underneath her car. At this point we were laughing so hard we could barely breathe. You know, those laughs where you start laughing a really high-pitched laugh that sounds so uncool when you’re a teenager but you can’t stop anyway.

Then the smoke started.

Big hair, blinker, old lady who can barely see over the dashboard dragging a mattress under her car with a plume of smoke behind her.

And that’s exactly what I thought of when the cardboard stuck to my car on the freeway today.

Of course, I immediately saw a security analogy in that. I have a client that has a glaring (although hidden) weakness in their product that I have wanted them to fix for quite some time now but it would require such a great effort and they have become so desensitized to it that it has become one of their lowest priorities.

And even though I do my best to secure everything else in the product and mitigate the impact of exploiting this weakness I still know that all it would take is for one clever person to find it to totally embarrass this company.

So many times we justify and minimize the impact of our own security flaws. We get so used to them that we don’t even see them anymore. And since we don’t see them we somehow think that no one else would see them either.

But they do. And before we know it, we are the old lady driving down the street with our blinkers on and dragging a smoking mattress. The problem stems from the fact that sometimes we can barely see over the dashboard ourselves.

Eventually she made a right turn (even though her blinker indicated a left turn), which freed the mattress and it spun across the road and on to the shoulder, smashing into a wall, still smoking and torn to pieces. We drove on, making those sounds you make as you wind down from a really, really good laugh.

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