Car Problems, Part Three

When I last stopped complaining about my car it had broken down twice in a matter of weeks, been repaired by the world's most incompetent mechanic and subsequently had its soul drained by my room mate's car. Well, as almost anyone who's ever owned a car, especially an old one, could have predicted it wasn't over then.

Oh yeah. The face palms are back!

About a week after all that went down, I decided to drive to Raleigh so I could help two different people move all their stuff. A friend from my undergrad years was moving from her town house to an apartment on Saturday; and as a small Asian girl with a small car, there was no way she could move a queen size mattress, a sofa, etc. all by herself. And my room mate's dad was moving to Raleigh and had a moving truck full of stuff that needed hauling.

Yeah, it sounds like a great weekend right?

Well, as part of this whole deal I had to borrow another friend's truck. And when I say truck, I really mean tank. Because whatever kind of truck he has should come with a slot for a turret gunner. I'm not just joking about how unwieldly and difficult to park it was. When I got there on Friday, he had actually been involved in an accident.

What was the damage you ask? His front bumper was dented and an NCSU vanity plate had to be replaced. "So it was just a fender bender right?" you say, sure that the other car was similarly lightly bruised. Oh no. He punted that car twenty yards, bent two of its tires under the car and broke its front axle.

Forget "right of way", he had "might of way".

So on Saturday he drove my car to work and I attempted to not destroy anything as I helped my friend move. That went more or less according to plan. He had to call me because the car wouldn't start (it has terrible battery leads) and I had to pull forward, cut it, and back up like a million times to fit into non-tractor trailer sized parking spaces.

Well, Sunday afternoon as I'm preparing to leave Raleigh I say all my goodbyes and thank him again for letting me use his truck and what not. That's when I discover that I can't get the car out of the "park" gear. It started fine, but just wouldn't come out of gear.

Fan-Fucking-Tastic.

I pop the hood to see if perhaps the oil had finally run out and maybe my engine was ruined. The oil dipstick's handle breaks off in my hand. The dipstick is still in the tank. I can't check the oil.

Great. Just what I needed. (sarcasm)

Okay. Okay. Calm down, go back inside and start asking for suggestions and turning to the magic of the interwebs to solve my problem. Google, do your thing. Text another friend who knows his way around a car's insides. Shouldn't be that big of a deal. Fingers crossed.

The friend must have been blazed, because he somehow thought that my car was stuck in "a park". Like a fucking state park with one of those gates and a sign that says "Gate closes at dark" or some shit. After like three or four more texts to clear that up, he says "Press the brake pedal when you're trying to change gears."

No shit, Sherlock. I know how to change gears.

Well, after a while, he finally says "Just pull really hard on the gear shift. That might work." And unable to find any help online, I am just desperate enough to try it. Right as I'm sure that the gear shift stick is about to snap in half, the car goes into drive! Huzzah! All is right in the world again! I am free!

Talk about premature celebrations.

Now, I put the car back in a parking space and turn it off so I can say goodbye to my friends, this time for real. But wait... The key won't come out of the ignition! What the fuck?

I struggle with that for another half an hour, texting, researching, hitting things with hammers...you know, things you do to fix things. But to no avail. That key is wedged in there tighter than that dorky kid in middle school's tighty whiteys after meeting the school bully.

Why doesn't this happen more often outside of television/movies?

"Fuck it!" I declare, and drive back to Greenville anyway. "I'll deal with this retarded car at a later date. I just have to get back before work tomorrow morning, and then I'll take it to a mechanic or something."

I only have one key for that car, and it was trapped in the ignition, so I had to leave one door unlocked in order to get back into the car. I disconnect the battery so it doesn't completely die on me before I can drive it to a mechanic. I'm mostly just glad to get back to the apartment without having a break down in the middle of nowhere on the high way.

Whew! Nearly looked like a fool there.

Once I finally get it to a mechanic, I tell them that I want my oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, and whatever other types of fluids there are to be changed out. I would also like my oil dipstick fixed and my key out of the ignition. They estimate it will be like five hundred dollars or so. I swallow back some profanity and say, "Alright. I'll leave it here over night and pick it up tomorrow."

About half an hour later, they call me to say that they need to replace the starter switch in order to fix the key problem. That part and labor would cost about $1,300. If that doesn't give you a bit of sticker shock, consider that I paid $1,800 for the whole fucking car. I didn't really have an idea what they could possibly have to replace that is worth more than all four tires, the engine, the windows, doors, seats, radio and anything else that you want to list.

THIS!!! THIS IS WHAT IT IS!!!

How in the Nine Hells is that part and the labor needed worth nearly seventy five percent of an entire car? Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway) I told them to finish changing my oil or whatever and I would pick up the car right away.

After waiting an additional forty five minutes longer than they told me it would be to finish whatever they were doing, I had to get them to jump my car in order to get out of their parking lot because they had left the battery plugged in with the key in the ignition for a few hours.

"I'm surrounded by idiots!"

I was already late for class, but had all my school stuff back at my apartment. So I trudge through rush hour traffic and finally get there. But then, literally as I pull into a parking space the car dies! And won't crank. My room mate helps me push it the last six feet into the parking space. As far as I'm concerned a viable option would be just lighting it on fire and cleansing myself of this hunk of junk vehicle.

And I will dance around the flames.

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.

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."

Ballin' is a Habit Part 1

Most people who know my room mate and me know that from time to time we've dabbled in a sport or two. The purpose of this blog post is to share a few amusing stories from our time on the court/field. Sometimes we're playing well, sometimes...not so much.

As a bit of background information, in high school I played football while my room mate played tennis, and we each look like somebody who would play those sports. But over the years we've spent in college and just being guys who like sports, we've played soccer, rugby, lacrosse, frisbee, golf, basketball, racket-ball, softball, bad-mitten, volleyball, shuffleboard, boce ball, bowling, competitive eating, darts, running, swimming, paintball, martial arts...you get the point.

Ironically, this may be the only sport we've never played.

The point is that we're both pretty athletic and willing to try new sports, but certainly not professional grade athletes. We can hold our own in the average pick up game. I'm going to try and mix up the stories so that there aren't two basketball stories back to back, or two tales of woe in a row, etc.

I'm going to start off chronicling the most extreme sports challenge that we've both accepted: the Krispy Kreme Challenge. Now, for anyone reading this who doesn't know what the KKC is, or perhaps thinks they know what it is but are actually mistaken, I'll give you the run down on what might be both one of the most difficult and most unique sporting events known to man.

Outside of base-jumping/ironing that is.

Begun in 2004 at that illustrious bastion of academic and athletic prowess that is North Carolina State University, the Krispy Kreme Challenge is two parts race and one part competitive eating. Competitors begin at the Bell Tower, run two miles to the local Krispy Kreme, consume a dozen glazed doughnuts, and then run back to the start. Proceeds go to the North Carolina Children's Hospital and the event grows in size every year. Last year had a limit of 6,000 participants and received television coverage from local news, ESPN and newspapers around the nation. Over the years it has spawned several imitators, none of which stack up to the original.

Just to summarize, that is roughly 2,400 calories (what the FDA lists as a full day's eating) and four miles of running. All in under an hour. Not too bad you say? The record is 24 minutes and 31 seconds, held by Auburn Staples. That equals two sub six minute miles, twelve rings of dough and sugar in a few minutes and then two more sub six minute miles on a very full stomach. Not to mention if you're not a front runner, you have to dodge piles of displaced stomach contents.

All too often competitors end up like this on the way back.

My room mate has completed it once and I've finished it twice, but barely failed to cross the finish line in under an hour the first time. There are many different methods of training and competing that people utilize, but the most important part is to be sure you can pound down a dozen doughnuts and then waddle back to campus. Trust me.

This athlete uses the Michael Phelps Diet.

The first time I tried it I was just coming off a run conditioning class and had run a 10k the month before, and thought I was good at eating but the doughnuts really stumped me. The next time I competed I wasn't in running shape, but I was definitely ready for the eating. I finished twenty minutes faster and didn't even have to run too fast on the way back, even cockily accepting another doughnut from a bystander halfway back.

How I felt on the way back.

While I was in my undergrad, I played a lot of intramural sports. One of those was flag football. I have a love hate relationship with flag football. On the one hand, it is football and a competitive sport, both of which I love more than Hitler hates that Hannah Montana was canceled after only three seasons.

"How will I find out if Hannah and Oliver ever hook up?"

On the other hand, it is flag football which means there are silly rules, lack of contact and the ubiquitous shitty intramural referees.

The role model of choice for intramural referees.

I often played with other people in my scholarship program, which was a mixed bag. I liked most of them, but every time I played on a team with them a small piece of my soul died, so I was always sure to play on a dorm team in an attempt to salvage my love of the game. Crushing defeats, lack of practice, crushing defeats, not living up to potential and sometimes even forfeiting due to lack of team mates was a regular occurrence with them. Did I mention the crushing defeats?

Each year we won our first game handily, usually like 30-0, boosting our hopes and dreams for a successful season. And then we promptly proceeded to free fall down into the depths of defeat. Once, we lost a flag football game 74-0.

No, that's not a typo. We lost 74-0.

We were down 52-0 at half time, and so we asked the referee when he was going to call it on the mercy rule. He said that he couldn't call it until the third quarter was over because, and I quote "You guys could make a comeback."

Maybe if we had T-Mac on our team making it rain.

And the sport was basketball. And we were only down by four scores instead of seven. And if the referee would call any fouls.

Seriously? Who the fuck thinks that we could make a comeback from being down by more points at halftime than an average team scores in an entire game? And the other team was getting the ball first in the second half.

Icebox is not impressed with the odds.

Alright, enough failure. Back to winning. And winning big. And winning without class, style or grace. Which is the best way to win. Or is the only way to win? I'm often confused about what constitutes sportsmanship. So I just look to my role model.

Pictured: one step above the taunting we've dished out.

Although my room mate and I aren't the best at basketball, we aren't terrible. We have some games where we're just on. And sometimes we're just physically better than our opponents, like that time we played 2v2 against these two random 7th graders. If you think I'm just saying that, feel free to corroborate my story. Not only did we play them, but we beat them.

This was one of those times. It was a 2v2 half court game against two sophomores who both weighed in at an impressive 5'4" and 140 lbs or so. I'm 6'1", 230 lbs, give or take a half an inch and a few pounds. My room mate is 5'12" and about 165 lbs. Needless to say we were their physical superiors in a game where size (height especially) is important.

Not that big of a difference, but it certainly helps.

We played them once, and it was a fairly close game despite our height advantage. I think that the final score was like 10-7 or something. Since it was a close game, and not particularly physical, we decided to run it back. This time it wasn't so close. Final score was 10-4. Convincingly.

I might have mentioned in a previous post that my room mate dreams of being able to dunk a basketball. During our rout of the wee folk, I got down on one knee and placed my hands in the classic "boost up" position, calling out "Come on, dunk it!".

The wee folk were not amused.

Now one of the kids was a bit pissed. I guess he fancied himself a bit of a baller, and didn't exactly enjoy my room mate and myself not only beating him and his friend, but mocking them as well. He demands a rematch, which of course we give him since we've been mopping the court with them. He starts to play hard, setting picks, driving to the basket, really hustling out there. To no avail. Final score was 10-6.

Update:

Months later we were at the gym, playing some pick up basketball and one of the people on the other team was the angry little guy. We weren't sure if he remembered us or not. But he certainly did. I had the ball and was about to go up for a layup when my room mate yells "Look out!". Angry wee man packs the shit out of my shot. He remembered that day, and it had obviously been rankling in his heart.

"Vengeance shall be mine!"