Wednesday, April 13, 2005

I Think I See Your Problem Here, Keep Your Hands Off That

So I leave the house last night (Tuesday night) to go get food. I came back and my garage door was open (I know I saw it shutting as I left.) My neighbor saw the error and was outside watching to make sure everything was alright and to scare away the one neighbor that walked by the garage a few times looking in. So I shut it the best I could so I could deal with it the next day. Meanwhile the car is losing power and after thinking that it's clogged fuel injectors, I had moved on to changing the spark plugs. So I leave for work this morning...

I drove home on the way back and felt the familiar issues with the car and decided to pick up some plugs for it and other accessories. I get a call when I get back from the garage door company and they say they will come out at 7pm (even though they close at 5pm.) I'm pretty impressed. So, I figure that I have enough time to change the plugs, grab a drink, clean a show or two off my Tivo and then watch the guy fix the garage door. This is not to be. In my attempt to pull one of the plug wires, the metal part that connects to the plug separates from the wire (pushing it back in didn't work.) I then find out my socket extention isn't long enough to reach the spark plug. So I wrapped up everything, cleaned up and waited for the garage door guy. He found out that my problem was the grooves on the sides of the doors that control the wires. The grooves were so worn down that the wires were catching on themselves. Wound up costing me about $100 ($30 service call, $60 parts and $10 tip I felt he deserved for doing overtime.) So, I then think... aha! I have time to run over to Lowes and pick up an extention, drop light and bulb. I do this and get back only to find that I really did screw up pulling that wire out and will probably need a new wire. The car died several times driving over to Lowes so I've decided that I'm going to have to call in sick tomorrow and get this crap figured out because I don't have another way to go about it. Watch me fix the wire issues, put in the new plugs and it winds up being a coil. I think I know why I have other people fix my car: so I don't feel like an idiot when I screw something up and make it worse.

3 comments:

Martin said...

hahaha... dunno about enjoying it though. B) Right now, I'm figuring out how long of a bus ride it will be to Auto Zone to see if they have the right cables for me (they want to see the original ones.) Should be much fun.

Unknown said...

Yeah Mart, go ahead and post the rest of this fiasco....geeez you and your car.

Martin said...

There is actually a great song by Adam Sandler that fits this but I'm trying to keep the profanity at a minimum. B)