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.