Door Chimes and Dingbats

The other day I began to wonder if when I moved out of the ghetto I would have anything to write about, then this shit happened...

After getting politely let off with a warning by the Overland Park police officer, I knew it was time to do something about my car. Driving it off a cliff sounded nice, but instead I decided to "call in some favors", which is fancy talk for have my dad call in some favors.

I brought my piece of crap ride (I used to talk nice about it, but now that it's breaking my heart I'm going to talk shit on it -- and we wonder why we give cars girl names) to Warrensburg to have my dad's mechanic friend work on it. First of course he wanted a go at it himself. So after a new brake light switch, new fuses, new bulbs and a disappointing result, we decided to leave it in "professional" hands. (I'm not trying to utilize quotation marks more, I just don't want to mislead anyone into thinking I actually went about this in any kind of a professional manner. Quite the opposite, I promise.)

To get my car to the mechanic I had two options: take it to the mechanic, whose shop was 15 miles away, or have someone follow me there and leave my car there for him to work on and have the person who followed me take me back into town. Somewhere around the time this was presented to me my dad disappeared (aka immediately).

Skip to 10 minutes later and I'm halfway to the small town which shall remain nameless. I'm actually a little afraid to say it, because the town is so tiny, this guy might be the only mechanic there (poor fuckers) and then everyone would know who I was talking about and yada yada yada I'm homeless.

As I'm pulling into the town, I don't know exactly where the garage is, so I call the mechanic and tell him I'm at the corner of Main St. and Other St. and he tells me to keep going.

...

Keep going where, you fuck? How fucking insane would you think I was if I told you to go to the corner of 31st and Holmes and told you when you get there to keep going until you got to my house. It would have been different if I had said something like, I am headed North on Main and I'm crossing Other, but I didn't say that. All I said was I'm at the corner of Main and Other and for all this guy knew I could have been a fucking hot dog vendor on the corner. Instead, he assumes I'm headed in whatever direction he is and tells me to keep going. Already I can tell this is going to go swimmingly.

30 seconds later I get to the garage, having reckoned with him that I needed a cardinal direction to continue. I pull up and hand the keys to the mechanic. Now, folks, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. I've been brought up better than that, and having this mechanic looking at my car for the price of pizza was certainly a gift, but I couldn't help it. I mean, maybe if the horse wasn't missing so many damn teeth it would have been easier. Did he play hockey before he became a mechanic? Did the tooth fairy pay him more attention than she paid the rest of us? Something about this guy's past told his teeth to get lost, and they listened.

So now I'm presented with sitting on patio furniture in the garage (what?), or in the waiting room. I chose to sit at the patio furniture and watch this guy work on my car. I wasn't overly concerned that he could do something to put it in worse shape than it already was (perhaps more details on this to come?), but if I'd have sat in the chairs in the waiting room, someone would have had to scrub the gross off of me with steel wool.

So it wasn't too long of a wait, maybe 10 minutes watching this guy test everything I'd already tested before he climbed into an awkward position under the steering column and, after a few seconds, the lights came on. "Are they on?" he asked. I replied that they were and he crawled out and said "Loose wire above the brake light switch."

Ok. That's all well and good. So I sat there for a few moments waiting for him to get back under the wheel long enough to reattach a wire, or patch something or glue something or get some duct tape, or ya know, anything. But instead he just walked away. At this point I figure out that that's all pizza is going to buy me. Hesitantly I ask if that's it, and he confirms my fears. So, I climb in and not wanting to be a jackass, I tell him I'll make sure he gets some money for his efforts (if the town had an ATM I wouldn't have had to make an absurd promise like that).

Here's where things start to go normal: The brake lights lasted maybe a day. Maybe. Luckily I was still in town, and I waited out the weekend, doing very little without transportation, and took the day off on Monday to take my car back to the mechanic. The afternoon rolls around, I return with my car, and pizza, and $20. As soon as I show up he comes outside, and I hand him the money, a sign of good faith if you will. I take the pizza inside expecting my car to make it to the garage. What an idiotic expectation that was. I look out into the street and there was the mechanic with his legs up in the air as though he were operating the pedals with his hands and driving with his knees. It is at this point I realized I have murdered someone in a past life.

A few minutes go by, there are some clicking noises and some blinkers applied, some ratcheting, and finally, "OK, here is your problem. This box controls the brake lights and the blinkers and there is a loose wire in here somewhere, and you need to replace this module." Reader, I can tell you that this time I took him in complete faith, because when a guy like that uses a word like module, you know he's got to be speaking the truth. So even though the problem wasn't fixed as I left 2 pizzas and $20 lighter, I was completely confident that when I got to NAPA and bought the new part, I could install it myself and this would all be over.



"That's a door chime."

"What?"

"It's the door chime for when you leave the doors open," my dad reported as he returned from across the street with the "module" in hand.

Fuck. I fucking knew it. "Haha, you actually thought shit was going to work out! FUCK YOU, BITCH!" Angry voices were taunting me in my head now. Maybe it was the all-too-awkward position of upside-down driving man I had assumed that was causing blood to rush to my head. Maybe it was the $20 the mechanic was pocketing while he ate a big slice of pepperoni pizza. Whatever it was, I felt sick.

A few calls later I had my car in the shop next door, and the mechanic there tells me there's a short, and it will cost $xx/hour to find it and fix it. Haha, are you kidding me? I don't even have mirrors. My A/C hasn't worked in 3 years. I get in and out of my car through the back doors. If I lock my car, I have a set of "break-in" tools I keep in the trunk. Did you catch that? Not if I lock my keys in my car, rather, if I lock it at all. There was a period of time when I drove around with my passenger door bungee corded shut, and you think I'm going to pay you a few hundred dollars to find a loose wire? Fuck you, guy.

A few more hours went by, and another friend of my dad's volunteered his skills as an electrician. We traced every fuse, we looked for wires loose, we did everything imaginable. At one point we thought we had it, but for some reason, the left turn signal caused the whole thing to go down again. So at this point I'm proud to report that I drove my car back to the original mechanic and left it for him. I'm driving around town in my dad's Blazer. You, kind mechanic, have pizza and my $20. Fix my car, dammit.