Car Problems, Part Two

After my car broke down the other week, and the terrible yet rather funny experience with the worst mechanic known to man, I was fairly certain that my car troubles were over for at least a few days. I had my car parked in front of my apartment, my room mate had just come back from his med school interviews, blaring "Where the Party At?" on his car speakers.

Happy days!

Life was good. I figured that my troubles were going to be held at bay for at least a few days. I mean, how much could go wrong with my car in the next 24 hours? I don't know why I even bother to think that anymore.

Seriously though.

I drove my car to class that night, and as I got out of class and turned my phone back on, I saw that I had a text message from my room mate saying that his car had a dead battery and that he'd appreciate my help jumping his car. I thought, "Sure, no problem."

So I got back to the apartment, parked my car and walked inside. Turns out what had happened was that since he has a keyless start, he had accidentally left it in idle after turning it on briefly to roll up his windows. No big deal. It's a pretty new car, so we figured it couldn't be that big a deal to jump it and didn't get out there right away. We ate some dinner and watched like forty-five minutes of television and then decided it was time to go outside and jump his car.

This is when things begin to go downhill.

Perhaps I should have realized that my battery might not be the strongest. For one, it's probably the same battery that came with the car when it rolled out of the factory in 1999. Also, it had been loitering in a public library parking lot for an entire week while that rocket surgeon of a repairman tried to find and then subsequently fix my car.

What I'm getting at is that my battery was dead.

My room mate decides to call University Transportation, because as part of our status as tuition payers we get some decent perks, like somebody to come jump our car on campus. And we live so close to the medical campus that there's normally no problem with a request like that. Well not this time.

Not only did the person we got on the phone somehow not know where the medical campus was, she couldn't comprehend that we live on the same street that runs right next to the regular campus and she didn't understand that there were two students, each with a dead car. She wasted nearly ten minutes of our time asking for our vehicle make, model, license plate numbers, telephone numbers, student ID numbers, mother's maiden names, etc before we finally hung up in frustration.

"I just told these two grad students to shove it"

No problem, right? We've got friends. Some of those friends have cars. Some of them are even reliable enough to help us out. So we sent out some texts desperately begging for help. But in a dignified manner.

Hey, we've got our dignity.

One of our friends decided to help us out. So he shows up and tries to jump start my room mate's car. To no avail. Now, I had been thinking about getting a new battery for my car anyway, so instead of just trying to jump my car, we drove to Walmart and bought a new battery for my car. That should help our situation out, right?

So we get back to the apartment, install my brand new battery, so fresh that you can smell the acid (not really), in my car. Since it's a brand new battery, and I was already parked next to my room mate's dead car, we decided to jump his car with my car. Seems like it would work, right?

Wrong. It didn't work. His car showed less signs of life than a career path as one of those guys who light the whale blubber oil lamps. Or perhaps an elevator operator.

This guy knows what I'm talking about.

Since that didn't work, my room mate managed to convince our friend and me to try something that he called the "double jump". For anyone who might not realize what the double part of that phrase refers to, it means that we were going to hook up two cars to the dead car. Sounds like nothing could go wrong, right?

Surprisingly, nothing actually goes wrong with that part of the plan. What does go wrong is that when we attempt to position our cars so that both batteries were in range of the jumper cables, my car doesn't start. Not like, has problems starting. Like, won't even beep when you put the key in the ignition.

Seriously, how often does this shit happen?

Somehow my room mate's car managed to suck the very life force out of a brand fucking new battery. How is that even possible? Like seriously, how can an entirely new battery fail to produce enough power to jump another battery? It's not like we were trying to start an F-17 with a golf cart. It was car to car.

My room mate turns to our friend and says, "Try to jump my car with yours now." My friend and I both turn to each other and say something along the lines of "Hold up! We don't need to have three cars all with dead batteries."

Bump that noise.

Luckily though, we were able to line up a second friend with a car who would be willing to come try and jump our cars if my room mate's car managed to drain the soul out of our friend's car as well. So we used the friend's car to jump my car, and then lined up for the double jump. Both of our cars hooked up to my room mate's car, attempting to breath some life back into the black hole that is my room mate's car.

Somehow, his car managed to take the combined power of two batteries, two fucking batteries, being run pretty hard, without getting more juice than was needed to roll his windows up or down. This isn't just one battery that failed. His car was showing less life than... well... you get the point.

It's probably just taking a nap.

So the next day, he calls AAA to get a truck out to our apartment and jump his car. The truck shows up with one of those handy dandy portable jumper batteries. Big surprise, that doesn't work on his vampire of a car. This is like the fifth combined battery that has failed to power his car and I'm starting to think that maybe we should just start sacrificing virgins or something.

You didn't think I meant hot girls, did you?

So the mechanic asks to borrow my jumper cables, and hooks my room mate's car up to his tow truck. The truck has two batteries in it, each of which is more powerful than a regular car battery. At long last, my room mate's car rises from the dead with a roar. He let it run for a good fifteen or so minutes, and I swear I heard it revving it's own engine a few times.

That car scares me now.

Car Problems

Some of you might have read an earlier post about bicycles, and the hassles that accompany them. This one is about cars, because apparently bad luck is not limited to two wheeled vehicles. As somebody who appreciates the humor in life, the following post documents the unabated week or two of car problems that recently plagued me and my room mate.

First off, some background information about the cars involved. The car that I own is a 1999 Ford Escort. It's gold, has four wheels, two doors, a sunroof, you know... car things. Anyway, about a month ago my car broke down while I was out of town. Although I'm not too mechanically inclined when it comes to cars, I did know that it wasn't the battery, the gas, oil, spark plugs, radiator, or what not.

Should have checked the flux capacitor, Doc.

Anyway, it turns out that the problem with my car had something to do with a primer belt, or a timer belt, or some sort of belt. It was rather inconvenient to be stranded an hour away from both my house and my apartment. It was fixed, and all was right with the world again. Happy days!

Little did I know, this was just a taste of the car troubles yet to come.

Cue ominous music.

A few weeks later, a veritable monsoon hit the eastern part of the state. Roads were closed, homes flooded, even some schools were shut down because of the excessive amounts of rain pouring down. Driving through that did not agree with my car in the least. After driving through a puddle the size of a small pond, suddenly my car didn't want to turn.

Lucky for that pedestrian, my brakes still worked.

So I manage to pull my car into the parking lot of the local public library where it would be slightly less likely to be pillaged for spare parts or towed than if it was simply left on the street somewhere. I took a look at it, and the engine belt was draped over my wheel axle. Not a good look for my car.

I had a similar experience once with a makeover attempt.

I went to get some estimates from local repair shops, all of whom were rather unhelpful and vague when it came to giving me a quote. I brought in photos of the problem, with a detailed description, and all they could do was say "somewhere between 100 and 300 dollars". Not cool. As a poor college student, that kind of bank is not really what I'm all about.

So, that weekend, while attempting to figure out what to do about my down and out car, a friend mentioned that he knows a mechanic who will come to where your car is (saving on towing) and fixes things for less than most repair shops charge. Sounds like a win right?

Wrong... So very wrong.

The friend who recommended this "Mobile Mechanic" happens to be a little flaky at times. We attribute part of this to his status as a home schooled kid. Perhaps I should have realized that this might not work out as smoothly as anticipated.

I call the guy, tell him what type of car I drive, what's wrong with it, and where it's parked. I also gave him my cell and work phone numbers in case he needs to get up with me about the car. I even tell him where I'm leaving the spare key for him. Seems like all you should need, right?

Wrong! Again!

He can't find the car. It's not like I parked in a super center parking lot or anything, with multiple levels or anything. I parked in the only fucking parking lot next to the only fucking library downtown. I was the only gold, two door, sun roof-having Ford Escort out of the thirty cars in the entire parking lot. This should have been easier than finding Waldo in Antarctica.

Not for this guy.

There comes a time when you have to realize that thinks aren't going smoothly, you need to cut your losses and move on. However, I am notoriously both stubborn and lazy. I wanted my car fixed, and fixed the way I started.

After nearly a week of having my car sit in the library parking lot, I got so paranoid that I started seeing tow trucks everywhere. Like, more than I've ever seen in my life outside of a 50 car pileup on the freeway.

I also began to hear unexplained fake country accents.

Luckily for me, the library apparently doesn't care if a car stays parked in their lot, without moving, at all. My car sat in that parking lot at all times. It was there at 11:30 at night, it was there at 5:45 in the morning, and it was there at 1:30 in the afternoon. All week.

The only good part of this story is that the fly by night mechanic only charged me ninety dollars for fixing my car. That was a good deal. And for that, I will not attempt to blacklist that terrible mechanic. It might have taken him five phone calls, three visits to the library parking lot, some research and a little bit of actual work, but he got it done.

Great job guy!

Ballin' Is a Habit Part Two

If you haven't read the first post on this topic, well honestly you're not missing too much. If you want to though, you can read up on the background athletic information. Quick recap: my room mate and I are decent at sports, and have played a lot of them. Hence, we've got a lot of stories about winning and/or losing horribly. Here come some more.

Sorry, this image was supposed to be for the post on cooking.

I'll start this post off with a brief tale of one of my more em'bare-ass'ing moments in sports. That's right, good for you! That not so subtle spelling alteration to the word embarrassing cued you in! This story is about pantsing!

For those of you who don't know what the term "pantsing" entails, it's a pretty simple concept. All you need is somebody with loose fitting pants/shorts and somebody else to pull those pants down. Now you can go pants somebody yourself! Let the merriment begin!

Huzzah!

For anyone who's ever played a sport against, played around with or simply been stuck in crowded elevator with a member of the opposite sex, you know that sometimes inadverdent contact is made.

Some times it's painful, like an elbow in the spleen. Some times it's awkward, like an elbow in the boob. Some times it's downright embarrassing, like pulling the shorts off a girl and exposing her rainbow colored panties to the entire intramural fields.

"Boy, I'm glad I wore underwear today."

That my friends is what happened to me, during one of my soul crushing defeats while playing flag football for Teaching Fellows during my undergrad years. For anyone who, for reasons possibly related to illiteracy (why are you pretending to read a blog?) or just poor imagination, the image below is an artist's recreation of the event I just described. In order to protect the identities of everyone involved, the rainbow panties wearing blond girl has been replaced with a cornrows wearing black man.

Also, the football was replaced with a rugby ball.

In my defense, those flag belts are actually more difficult for me to grab than it would be for me to actually tackle somebody. I have to repress a lot of training and frustration to just go for the flag. That's one of the reasons I dislike flag football. It makes me look like an impotent fool who can't even grab a silly piece of fabric dangling from a smaller man's waist. Outrageous, I know. Moving on.

It's not just sports that involve raquets, bats, wheels, frisbees, food or greased pigs that my room mate and I have played. He used to be quite the paint ball player. I've played like twice, one of those times with him. We were on a trip sponsored by NCSU's Cru or something and were playing some paintball. It was mostly rental style equipment, so nothing too pricey.

Not that cheap. Is that even a real paintball gun?

There about 14 or so people on the trip, so we had decent teams. We played in some nice woods, full of trees, creeks and underbrush. Now I had heard my room mate was good, but it was all from him and I sort of assumed that he was just bragging a bit.

The first game of capture the flag we played was over in like three minutes. I didn't see anybody. My room mate just walked back with their flag and said he got six of them. No big deal.

Artist's simulation of my room mate playing paintball.

This continued for the rest of the day. One time he had expended his 20-30 shots gunning down half the opposing team, turned to one he had just taken out of the game and politely asked the dude for some ammo.

The guy gave it to him.

To this day I'm not sure if the other guy did that because he was a genuinely nice guy or if the blood lust in my room mate's eyes terrified him that much.

He did say "please".

If you ever play basketball with my room mate and me, you'll know that there are few things we appreciate more than blocked shots. If you can pack somebody's jumpshot right back down to the ground, that's almost as good as dunking in our opinion. And since neither of us can dunk, looks like you're about to have your shot denied a time or two.

Don't forget the subsequent trash talking.

While neither of us are spectacular basketball players, we both believe in playing close, aggressive defense. Which doesn't work out well if we're on opposing teams and have to guard each other. Passes get stolen, shots get blocked, people get hurt. Mostly my room mate. He jokes that he has to call fair catch before going for a rebound against me.

What can I say? Football is my first love.

But even we draw the line when it comes to blocking the shots of people who obviously shouldn't be blocked in an aggressive manner. Like six year olds. Unless you are also of a single digit age, you should never think that it's cool to block a little kid's shot. Especially to the point where you knock him to the ground. I'm not going to go into detail about this, but let it be known that we know a girl that we call "Lebron" in memory of her rage blackout style play against a little kid.

"And give me your juice box while you're at it."