"So do you miss your truck?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Really? But you had it for 10 years."
"10 years without shocks and a broken windshield, 3 years without air conditioning, the last year with a busted radio. Don't miss it at all."
Yeah, I was accused of being unsentimental, but I had my fancy new car to soften the blow. And man, was it wonderful. Leather seats, air conditioning, quiet and smooth ride, the false sense of superiority that can only come with owning a luxury vehicle that eats gas the way I eat Pixi Sticks.
All the way up to Friday night when it refused to start up after dinner at Cheddars. And by 'refused to start' I mean 'became possessed by Satan'. Trying to start up the car led to weird electrical madnesses, like the unlocking mechanism going on the fritz and rapidly unlocking the doors over-and-over-and-over like a machine gun for minutes at a time and all the gauges on the dash flicking around like the car was having a seizure.
I do not put it past the Truck of Malfunction to have cursed me and my new car for tossing it to the side. Its revenge is both swift and terrible. Because for all its faults, it never once had a day when it didn't work, in 10 whole years. Here we're not a full month into ownership and already the new car has acquired a demon and won't drive me places. Arg.
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We track down a tow truck guy (thanks to the always delightful AT&T roadside service) who manages to get the car out of the Cheddars parking lot with an assist from Jordan, who did the steering and pushing (I was busy filling out forms and internally freaking out.). I am momentarily worried even more when the tow truck stalls in the middle of the street on the way back to my apartment, but thanks to some ingenuity by the truck owner (his, I swear to God, exact words: "You know, it's like Star Trek, you gotta get up and going a bit before you can jump to warp speed.") we make it home without dying.
Sadly, jumping the car when we get there does a whole lot of nothing. I pronounce my new car dead for the night, and make plans to enlist Devon for a serious car-fixing adventure the next day (because Devon is my go-to car fixer, as based on our previous experiences together).
I am firmly of the belief that it must just be a dead battery that is causing the trouble, and not just because I can't imagine the expense of something more dramatic when I don't even have my real license plates yet. I pull out my Box-o-Tools(TM), and we get to work on The Plan.
The Plan: Replace the Battery (consists of 4 Steps)
Step One: Remove the old battery
Step Two: Acquire a new battery
Step Three: Replace new battery in car
Step Four: Car explodes
Step One: Remove the old battery. Yeah, not so much. The negative cable that connects the battery to the car is completely fused to the battery and will not relinquish its hold. We use everything we can think of: Devon's Coke, WD-40, a hammer, all to no results. After about 45 minutes of futility and frantic calls to parents who may have more experience in the matter, it is again Devon who works it out - while she levers the connector upwards with a screwdriver, I wail on the side of it with a hammer after we've fully soaked the whole thing in a puddle of Coke. It pops off, and Step One is completed after I wrestle the battery out of its casing, nearly destroying my hands in the process ("How am I supposed to grab onto this thing?! It weighs 100 pounds and is nothing but sharp edges.").
As I expected Step One to be the easiest and shortest of the steps, I was a little daunted. We proceed on!
Step Two: We take the battery to the National Tire and Battery store, for a replacement. I insist on bringing the battery in to the store with us, as I feel that taking multiple trips back and forth would be folly. Again, wrestling with the battery nearly fells me. I make it to the counter, thump the battery on it and slump to the ground.
Quoth the Battery Technician: "Yeah, we don't stock that kind of battery. You should call around to other places."
I drag the battery back to the car - Devon now firmly believes I am insane, but still agrees to drive me around. After tracking down a place who swears they have one in stock, we make the long and arduous journey across the White Rock Lake to the secondary battery store. Again with the dragging of the old battery, I will no doubt die very soon. Once it's on the counter and I'm standing there sucking wind, the Checkout Guy looks at me a little funny and unfolds the little handles on top of the battery that I didn't notice and carts it to the back without the slightest issue.
I cry a little bit, but take the new battery in trade and head back to Devon's car. Step Two down.
Step Three: We get the battery into place without incident. But then we lose the nut to the negative terminal wire. After several minutes of searching, we do not find it and assume that the car has eaten it, as some sort of offering to the car gods. Plus, it turns out to not matter in the slightest, as the negative wire is so corroded that even if we had the nut, it wouldn't be able to tighten at all. Luckily the battery terminal is roughly the same size as the old version (naturally), so it appears that the car might still work without excessive yet sensible tightening.
Step Four: Turn on the car, and surprisingly nothing blows up. It's a miracle and yet again Devon has saved my automobile. She's very good at that.
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Which is where the story still stands. I need to get the faulty wire replaced (it's not tight enough, and thus is prone to not starting until I root around under the hood with a screwdriver, the constant threat of electrocution just over my head like so much low hanging fruit), but mechanics that I trust enough to repair my largest financial holding in the world are tough to come by. I have an appointment scheduled for Thursday morning and hopefully the car will not explode, or die in the middle of traffic on the highway, or once again become possessed by a demon and try to unlock me to death until then.
Anyways, so that was my holiday weekend (excluding the crapload of movies that I went to see (see sidebar)). How was yours?
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