Dear Blog,
I really must remember that while I may have inherited some of my father's innate engineering skills, I am not a mechanic. I feel like I should be sentenced to writing that mantra on a blackboard somewhere about 1,000 times like Bart Simpson does at the opening of each episode of that series...
As some of you know, I bought a co-worker's pristine old Nissan Sentra not too long ago and immediately went about doing what I usually do - fixing and puttering and improving where I felt it was needed. New seat covers, new floor mats, checked all the vital fluids, gave it a thorough washing and cleaning and vacuuming and lubricated whatever needed it, etc. Among the checks was the battery, which seemed to me to be low on water, so off to the drugstore for distilled water and fill fill fill...
Therein lay the snag. You can actually fill a battery's chambers too full (duh, most people would call that overfilling, you dolt!)... naturally, I assumed I had done well and that Nissan would be happy. Well, er, it weren't so. The weird short (which manifests itself in that when the CD is playing and I switch from low-beam headlights to high-beams, the CD stops for a few moments) grew aggravated. It grew so aggravated so as to make the car act haunted, even possessed!
Driving home after watching Avatar recently, the car began to start misbehaving badly (inducing panic in the driver, naturally). Symptoms went from annoying to bizarre to worse... stepping on the brake pedal would cause the ventilator fan to stop. As it was raining, the windshield wipers were on, and they seemed to get slower and slower while the dashboard lights faded to the point of near black-out. As I was driving Chapman's Peak Drive, it got scary. I switched off the CD altogether and that improved things slightly - the windshield wipers began behaving less erratically. I switched the vent fan (defogger) off and things got better still. I drove with low-beams only (and thus much slower) and made it home, albeit worried as I had to get up early and drive to work in the dark next morning.
Being an optimist (could have fooled you, huh?) I decided that everything would be alright in the morning. Car started, off we tootled towards downtown. I experimented along the way to have a near repeat performance manifest itself by a new display of automotive haunting, thus learning that I was not able to use the CD if I wanted the lights and dash lights to work properly.
As I had been through all of this with the predecessor vehicle, a rotten old VW Jetta which was more concealed rust than car, I immediately assumed the battery had gone to the dogs, connecting it to my recent efforts at making things better. A quick look under the hood (translation: bonnet for South Africans) confirmed that the battery's little "magic eye" thingy had gone from green (good!) to a red dot (very bad). Since this is one of those cash-sparse months (after having done all the other things getting a new skedonk entails), a new battery seemed like a very bad thing to have to invest in at a very inopportune time.
That afternoon I drove home from work and on the driveway ramp leading to the Fort Knox-esque, electrified gates surround ye olde Baronial manse, Nissan hiccuped and decided to die. My mind went into absolute shock as this exact same thing had happened in the exact same spot with aforementioned predecessor vehicle, a/k/a POS or Piece of Shit. No! Not again! And that had cost over a cool grand to get fixed (American readers - note: Rands, not Dollars).
I rolled Nissan back down the drive and after much cursing, many attempts at reviving the now obviously dead as a doornail battery, gave up, muttering and cursing about everything and the world and locked up the car and went inside, worrying that someone would break into it or do more damage to it than I already had in my own glorious stupidity.
The new and revolting development also meant I had to get up reeeeallly early again next morning thanks to the absolutely foul, stupid and useless Metro schedule - after all, if the battery didn't somehow miraculously "recover" on its own, I'd have to take the train in to work. Most inconvenient.
I woke up on time, tired as I could be, went through my morning triple S* and went out, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. Expectations were not let down - turning the key produced a click followed by an obviously dead battery sound. I trotted off to the Metro station, only to find out that a schedule change caused by some tracks having been wiped out by waves nearby meant I had just missed the train I had gotten up so early for and the next one, which would get me to work half an hour late of course, meant I could have stayed in bed at least another 45 minutes... groan.
No matter, I called work, let them know I was on my way and would be late and then tortured myself all day long trying to figure a way out of what seemed a hopelessly stupid, obviously self-induced and potentially expensive situation. On the way to the Metro station that afternoon, I suddenly had one of those epiphany moments and realized I could probably go to Game - a South African chain which seems to be sort of like Wal-Mart on a smaller scheme and look at batteries or - better yet - a battery charger!
Well, the batter charger worked a treat and for now Nissan is back on the road with the green eye happily showing under the hood. The high beam switch still makes the CD player hiccup, so further investigation is warranted - and I assume it is either a defective voltage regulator or whoever installed said CD player has hooked something up wrong somewhere...
Ah, the bliss of car ownership! Well, come July I will move to new digs somewhere that are not at the end of the world. While Muizenberg is beautiful in terms of its position on the edge of the Indian Ocean, it is rapidly decaying and becoming grottier every day, with more and more riff-raff walking the streets and the relatively safe feeling I had when I first moved here nearly evaporated now...
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* Triple S - a favorite expression of my friend Steve's - stands for morning ablutions a/k/a "shit shower and shave"
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