Sorry for the delay in getting a new post up. I’ve been busy watching men and women in tights doing things on ice and snow. And then of course there were the Olympics.
Last year I purchased a new (not new new but new to me new) vehicle and it’s the first vehicle I’ve owned that I am leery of getting my hands dirty on because of all the electronics and gadgets and technologies wrapped up within it. It’s been about 6 months now and while I truly enjoy this vehicle, I think it’s making me a little soft.
See I’ve always driven cars that were simple. Vehicles that were carbureted, with manual transmissions, roll up windows, and no power key locks. Most have been pick up trucks where I would think nothing of opening the hood and changing a fan belt or a fuel filter. For many years I carried a tool box and a roll of duct tape that could pretty much limp me home in case of most emergencies. One of these vehicles lasted 350 000 kms before it was sent to the great big recycler and the other retired at the hands of a rear ender with an SUV. No amount of duct tape was going to fix that boo boo.
With most cars I’ve owned a simple set of tools was all I needed and a simple butter knife could open any interior panel to reach and fix a crackling speaker for instance. My latest vehicle required me to buy a panel popper tool to perform the same task and when I finally did remove the panel to reveal the malfunctioning wire harness buried within, there was no way for me to fix it without a visit to the dealer and nice fat invoice to get the issue resolved.
This latest vehicle is just too smart for me. It tells me when my washer fluid is low and opening the hood, I was hard pressed to find most of things I should recognize there. I can find where to fill the window washer fluid but to this day I still don’t know exactly where the actual reservoir is located. I’ve gotten so soft that I currently don’t even carry a set of jumper cables in the car and up until this vehicle that was unheard of. Just last week when someone needed their vehicle boosted I had to use their booster cables and felt a real sense of shame for not having my own at the ready.
Plus it’s just not very exciting driving something you know will get you there in one piece safe and sound and warm. I had a truck that would sometimes refuse start unless you crawled under neath it and smacked the starter motor with a hammer. This didn’t sit well with a girlfriend I had who was somehow not fond of having to perform this maneuver whenever she borrowed the truck. It also came back to bite me when it wouldn’t start one night when I needed to have her drive me to the emergency room in an isolated community.
We’d gone camping and I was chopping some firewood to make kindling while she went to the washroom. She was barely out of sight when I managed to put the hatchet through the thumb of my hand that was holding the piece of wood I was intending to cut. I remember noticing how big my thumb got almost immediately and feeling the blood drain from my face.
My girlfriend returned to the campsite just as I was going into shock and her initial reaction to seeing my face as white as a ghost was to take me to the emergency room so she piled me into the cab of the truck and hopped into the driver’s seat. Then of course as luck would have it, the truck decided it wasn’t particularly interested in a midnight drive in the country. No matter how hard she tried we weren’t going anywhere. She quickly resorted to Plan B which was to get me drunk so that I wouldn’t feel the pain. This plan worked really well except that the pain in my hand was simply moved to a pain in my head in the form of a hangover the next morning.
By the time we were able to get the truck started the next day, the swelling had gone down in my thumb, if not my head. I eventually lost the nail on that thumb and the starter on the truck was replaced as soon as the feeling and nail returned to my finger.
I don’t foresee a similar story with this vehicle though as I haven’t crawled under it to find where the starter motor is located and I don’t camp that much anymore either. Another sign of my softening I suppose.
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