[monster]

Originally Posted by SteveDallas

Upsetting? Eh. More like a comedy of errors.

Wednesday evening I stupidly left the lights in my car on. (The alarm that's supposed to alert me to this doesn't work. Or rather, it rings all the time when the door is open, so I'm used to ignoring it.) I jump started the car from our minivan.

Thursday at work I ONCE AGAIN left the lights on. I waited for AAA to come do a jump start. After my 30 min. drive home, I waited a few minutes and tried to start the car. It was fine.

But I guess it really wasn't--I could tell as soon as I put my key in this morning that the battery was half dead. Not that surprising; it's over four years old. So I drove my daughter to school in the minivan and then went to Auto Zone for a battery.

It took about 5 minutes to place the new battery in and attach the cables and, lo and behold, the car started just fine. At this point I was looking at being 10 or 15 minutes late for work--not bad, all things considered. All I had to do was put on the bolts that hold the battery in place.

Oops. I dropped one. Unfortunately it didn't just fall all the way through to the ground. It took me some time to fish it out. In order to do so I had to get the battery out of the way, so I now put it back in and reattached the cables. The - cable was sliding around on the terminal, so I tightened it up a bit. And the conector just broke in two.n

Now, I'm not very strong, so anything I can destroy with my bare hands is in pretty bad shape. So, one more trip to Auto Zone for a new connector. (Not to mention a can of hand-cleaning glop.) This time everything went well and I got the battery connected and bolted down, and got to work an hour late.

(Bonus: One fun thing I got to do after arriving was to explain, fruitlessly, to a vendor that "GMT" and "London time" are not the same thing, because GMT doesn't change for Summer Time.)

This was us recently. But after the last time we bought a charged battery starter thing so I can jump it myself