Had a mildly interesting drive to work today.
Perhaps foolishly I took the hilly B-road rather than the more circuitous A-road. It had been cleared, but drifts were blowing off the fields in places.
It was all going fine until I crested the brow of a hill and encountered a big drift covering the whole road, which was still blowing off the field creating complete white-out conditions. I couldn't see a thing. A tap of the brakes told me that I had none, the wheels just instantly locked. So I took my foot off the brake, downshifted and tried my best to keep the car on where I thought the road was. After a few feet the white-out cleared and I could see where I was going again.
Had another car been coming I would have crashed.
My heart was pounding a bit after that.
In retrospect if I had been in 2nd rather than 3rd when I hit the white-out there wouldn't have been such a problem. The drift and white-out section was hard to see much in advance due to the topography, but the real problem was I didn't anticipate the total loss of visibility inside it.