To be honest, out of all the car problems that I could have, the one that is usually the most obvious to see and easiest to fix is a dead battery. What’s tricky is that when the battery keels over when I don’t tell it to, my car doesn’t start, and I’m usually not within walking distance of a place that just happens to have a replacement. (Wouldn’t that be convenient?) What begins as an easy problem instantly becomes one of the most dreaded: the car is stranded.
Moral 1 of this story: Pizza and lightning don’t mix
At the end of a typical day, I drive 30 minutes from work to pick up my handsome hubby from campus. Then we hunt for food. We catch our meal at home most of the time, but there are those days when I just crave nice, cheap, low-quality Little Caesar’s pizza. So a few days ago, we gave in to my craving.
The entrance to Little Caesar’s happens to be the entrance to, like, everything on that side of Provo (not really), so I dropped Clayton off and escaped the driving madness, parking a ways from the entrance facing a storm. It hadn’t started raining yet, and the lightning show was beautiful. I’m addicted to lightning when I’m under a safe shelter. Clayton came back with pizza, and I was so hungry and dying that we ate it then and there in the car. We chowed down and watched the lightning bolts whizz across the sky. Mmm, romantic.
During this time it started to sprinkle. The engine was off, but I kept the key turned in the ignition to roll the lovely power windows up and down. I was nearly done stuffing my face when I realized I had left the key turned for some time, and it was running the AC. I took the key out and expressed a little concern about the battery being drained, but my fear was quickly reassured by Clayton, who said there was no way the battery could die so fast from the AC running for so little a time.
You see, he thought the battery was somewhat new. But lo and behold..
Moral 2 of this story: When two cars meet and there are sparks, this does not mean love
Rain plopped on us right as we changed drivers; I slid from the driver’s seat to the passenger’s seat, dry as a beat, while my poor husband ran outside around the car and got soaked. Then he turned the key and we realized we had a problem. This wasn’t the first car to die on me, so I knew that the battery might slowly recharge. However, as the rain pounded the windows and mocked us, we started to feel the absence of the AC; and “slowly” was just not fast enough. We called Clayton’s sister’s fiance to come to the rescue. Then my husband boldly faced the rain to look under the hood.
Thankfully, there’s this thing called “jump starting,” where we scare the car so badly that it jumps to life. The driver of the car that was facing us walked by with her pizza, observed my husband under the hood, and kindly asked if we could use a jump. Heck yes! and she asked, did we have jumper cables? Oh yeah! My parents bought me jumper cables as a gift, I believe, when I had my 1998 Kia Sephia, who I ingeniously named “Sephia.” (The Buick is named Caesar.) Sephia had no automatic anything whatsoever except power steering. That meant she didn’t turn her lights off automatically, and sometimes, just to get a good laugh and make me suffer, that car didn’t beep to let me know the lights were still on as I walked away to take a three-hour test. Well, I showed her, and scared her quite a bit to jump her back to life.
I sat dry yet again in the car as Clayton attached the cables to the vehicles, though the rain had taken pity by now and thinned to a drizzle. Then I saw sparks. Sparkly, but freaky; I’ve never seen sparks when a car was being jump started...ever. That got me out of the car, and I asked if the cables were on the wrong nodes of the batteries. There was lots of uncertainty going around, so I just went back inside and tried to start the thing. Not a peep from the engine, which was less sound than we’d gotten out of it during our futile attempts to start it before.
At one point, I saw Clayton thanking her, and she drove off. When I came out, he said that her battery wasn’t marked. What’s positive, what’s negative? What’s right, what’s wrong? What’s really natural flavoring, what’s artificial? Nobody knows.
Another guy had appeared to see the sparks, and after she drove away he came and helped. It took several tries, actually; Caesar just doesn’t scare easy. Clayton’s sister and fiance arrived in time to see Caesar come alive. There were thank-you’s all around, and then everyone finally left the parking lot of Little Caesar’s.
Moral 3 of this story: Once you’re free, just go home and enjoy life
By now Clayton was convinced that the battery was not new. I wanted to go to Walmart to buy a new one, since that’s where I’ve always gone, but he reminded me that AutoZone tests batteries for free, so why not make sure? We started to look up AutoZone on Clayton’s phone GPS, but I remembered having seen an AutoZone, like, every day since school started when I drive Clayton to and from campus. This was on the other side of town from Little Caesar’s, but finally, we got there and the huge signs plastered all over the windows that said Free Battery Testing and Charging! Free Check-Engine Light Diagnostic! Free Vehicle Repair Guide! gave me so much hope, and...
Their battery tester was broken.
Lousy lying signs.
We searched for another AutoZone in town, and of course--ironically--this other place was within walking distance of where the car had died. Go figure. Well, this time they had a battery tester that lived up to their signs, and it proclaimed the battery worthy of being replaced. Tired, but thankfully not hungry, we drove to the other, other, other side of town to Walmart, pulled up to their Auto Center...
And they were closed.
Lesson learned, we called it a day and drove alllll the way back home, finally, to collapse into each other’s arms, stare into each other’s eyes, and live to fight another day.
