I had a REALLY close call on the road today. I was driving to my weekly ping pong club get-together, and it was starting to rain fairly hard. I had a car in front of me, and I thought I had a good idea of where he was in relation to the next stop light, and therefore where he would be stopping. The mistake is that I misjudged how many cars were in front of THAT car, and therefore he wound up stopping much earlier than I thought, and I had to slam by brakes because my approximation of safe speed was WAY WRONG AND I WAS GOING WAY TOO FAST. This, combined with the rainy road, meant I was skidding helplessly at the car in front of me. As a last ditch measure, I twisted the wheel all the way to the left to try to spin my car, and shorten the striking distance of my car; turns out this was a bad idea as my car didn't spin enough to do that, but it did spin enough to put the rear of my car into the next lane and turn me into a fucking road hazard. It was all I could think to do at the time.
FORTUNATELY my habit of putting a lot of room between me and the next nearest car finally paid off, and my skidding only carried me to within arms reach distance of the car in front of me. Once the light turned green, I meekly straightened myself out and progressed to my destination at a much more cautious speed.
In hindsight, I probably could have slowed down enough to do an emergency lane change into the slower lane, which had fewer cars in it; I wasn't calm or rational enough though, and I didn't have enough time to check my mirrors.
The happy was that I averted an accident just narrowly, and that I really wasn't that upset about it afterwards. Usually any near miss turns me into a nervous wreck, but I feel my psyche remained intact afterwards and I was able to enjoy my ping ponging without an overwhelming sense of guilt.