A Big Twuck
We planned to pick at the repairs one by one and eventually we’d trade it in somewhere down the road. But a few weeks after we got it back from the thieves I tried to take it down to have the brakes worked on and when I tried to start the car the battery seemed like it was dying. Nik wasn’t home at the time so I didn’t have the means to jump it and left it alone. When she got home, I slacked about getting it done and it wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that I went out to try again, this time with jumper cables in tow.
The first try of the ignition revealed that the battery wasn’t just dying, it was dead and bloated. We tried to jump it to no avail. Nik called a tow company to inquire about getting it hauled down to the brake shop and he seemed to balk at the prospect of towing the car. “Try jumping it for a longer period of time,” he suggested. I was irritated and decided to deal with it at a later date.
For the next couple of weeks the car got progressively worse looking as the dust and heat caked a thick layer of grime onto the car and it sat unattended in one of the valuable open parking spaces in the lot. Each time I passed it—going to the laundry room, getting the mail, hopping into the Honda for some other excursion—I noted the Saturn with grim contempt and told myself, “You better do something about that.” Instead I played video games and watched Netflix DVDs. I fiddled on my computer and tried to avoid the drama and expense of getting the car fixed.
For the most part it wasn’t an issue; I had the train to take to work or, since Nik started working close to my office, we could commute together. A second car was nice but not mandatory, so long as Nik and I were doing the same things or one of us was okay with staying around the house. It made the procrastination easier.
Finally last week Nik came home from work on a day I was doing the work-at-home thing. “Tell me you did something with the car,” she said. I looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Huh?” I offered, hoping she was having a bit of fun with me or perhaps had gone completely mental.
“The Saturn isn’t down there. What happened to it?”
“I dunno,” I said truthfully. “I was just down at the laundry room a couple of hours ago and I didn’t notice it missing.”
“Do you think it got stolen again?” she asked.
I sighed dramatically. “I don’t know.”
Nik began to get on the horn, trying to call the office and from there moving on to the police. There was no answer at the office so she started looking up the police department number.
“Wait a sec,” I interrupted. “That car wasn’t stolen, it couldn’t have been.” It was Nik’s turn to raise an eyebrow. I continued, “It doesn’t run at all. Unless some thief is out there carrying spare batteries with him, it had to have been towed.”
Nikki’s lip curled into a sneer. “You’re right.”
When we finally tracked down the office rep, they informed us that they had indeed towed the car. They didn’t know the exact reason but it could have been a number of things, including having been parked in the same spot for too long. They gave us the number of the tow yard it had been taken to and told us we’d have to get it from them. A quick call to the towing company revealed that the cost for getting it out of their yard was going to be $210 smackers if we got it that day, and it would go up $45 each subsequent day it remained.
We took off from our jobs early that day to drive in to pick it up, which idiotically had to be done in person. We still needed it to be towed to wherever since it wasn’t running so we contacted AAA (with whom we have a special membership that allows us to do unlimited tows within a certain range for free—one of the better service packages we’ve ever decided to pick up) and had them meet us at the other towing company since they weren’t the AAA affiliate in our area. Natch.
We had the Saturn towed to a nearby auto shop that I like and told the guy there, “Just get it running. There’s something wrong with the battery, so fix that and leave the rest alone.” A couple of days later the guy called me and said he’d tried to recharge the battery but it didn’t hold. They had changed the battery for me a couple years earlier and said it was still under the original warranty so he replaced it for the cost of labor alone, something like $40. Which was finally a bit of good news regarding that dumb car.
In the meantime the Honda started having some problems with the suspension on the rear passenger side: A heavy thunking sound that could be heard mostly when going slowly over heavy bumps or making tight corners. Plus the maintenance light was coming on so we needed to take it down to the shop as well. Nik made an appointment for Friday since she had the day off and I was working from home. After my shift was over we piled into the Civic and drove to the first auto shop to pick up the Saturn. From there we drove straight to the Honda dealership and dropped off the Civic, taking the Saturn over to a nearby detail shop to get cleaned up. The tag on the Saturn had indicated that the rationale for towing was “Unsightly Appearance” so I didn’t want to risk getting it towed again.
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