She was looking for a small car (she’s seriously short) that
gets excellent gas mileage since her work commute has more than quadrupled in
length and she has concerns about the size of her carbon footprint and blah
blah blah.
Me, I don’t worry about things like that. I drive a ‘regular’ car…the type that runs on
gasoline and makes a satisfying growling sound when I rev up the V6 engine
under the hood. I like it that way.
Now, I’m not a car person by any stretch of the imagination. I have some very basic ‘car stuff’ knowledge,
like knowing how to check and add oil, how to add coolant, how to add windshield
wiper fluid, and most importantly when to take my vehicle into the garage to be
serviced. But along the way I have
learned one really useful skill which I feel every woman should learn and that
is: how to jump start a car. This
singular piece of knowledge has proven itself to be both useful and valuable
many times. It’s simple, straight
forward, and only truly intimidating the first time.
And now for the story…
Yesterday morning my roomie alerted me to the fact that her
car wouldn’t start. For those of you who
don’t already know, the Prius has something like twelve different batteries,
any of which might lose their charge at any time. Now, we didn’t know which one
was dead but since she couldn’t even get the doors unlocked I was leaning
toward ‘all of them.’ Asking my opinion
on her options for the day I recommended that she call my mom and hitch a ride
to work and worry about the car that afternoon.
During the evening hours it was decided (read that as ‘demanded’)
that I would provide a jump start to get the car moving this morning and that
she would drive it ‘somewhere’ to get checked out and have a new battery (or
twelve) installed.
Dutifully, at the crack of dawn this morning we headed out
to the garage to start her car. I popped
open my hood, wrestled off the battery cover and hooked up my jumper cables.
Roomie seemed to be struggling with her version of this task and finally threw up her hands in
frustration and asked if I wanted to give it a try. It took me about 15 seconds to locate the
release and open her hood.
Then I got my first look at her engine and I just want to go
on record and say that the engine of the Prius is ridiculous. I think it’s actually installed
sideways. I didn’t recognize
ANYTHING. So I turned to my roomie and
asked the most obvious question…
“Where are your battery leads?”
She blinked at me owlishly and replied “I thought you knew
how to do this.”
“I do…on a regular car.
But this is an electric car and since I don’t want to blow it up, how
about you go find out?”
Roomie promptly disappeared into the house to do a quick web
search. Upon her return she announced
that the positive lead was inside the fuse box and the negative lead was just
outside of the fuse box.
“Excellent. Where is
the fuse box?”
More blinking. And
then she scampered away to find out.
“Here it is!” She chirruped as she pulled open one of the
myriad of flat black boxes that litter the engine compartment. Underneath the cover was a cluster of
switches and buttons but nothing that looked like a battery lead.
“Ummm….”
“Hang on, I’ll go check.” *insert swooshing sound as roommate
runs back into the house again*
“Okay…on the diagram online it’s labeled with a big plus
sign. But…I don’t see a big plus sign.”
“Well…” at this point I picked up the cover of the fuse box
and turned it over and found a helpful diagram.
Matching up the pictures I was able to locate the positive lead.
“Okay, it means that one is the negative lead.” *helpful
pointing from roomie*
“Alright then.” I
attached the positive jumper cable clamp, made a bit more difficult by the fact
that the positive lead is buried in the middle of the fuse box rather than being
conveniently located near the side, and then attached the negative clamp to the
negative lead…jumping backward when the thing sparked dramatically. But hey, the car was alive again, all the
little lights on the dashboard told us so.
(Serious side note: when jumping a car you are supposed to attached the positive lead to the battery of the car needing the jump and attached the negative lead to an unpainted metal surface within the engine block. There were no such surfaces within reach of the jumper cables...every single surface was plastic, meaning that my ONLY option was the negative battery lead.)
I instructed roomie to start her car and just let it run for
a few minutes while I wandered back into the kitchen to get myself a much
needed cup of coffee. I headed back out
and had her rev the engine a few times to really get things moving and
disconnected the leads, returned the fuse box cover and shut her hood. I then wandered over to my car, removed the
other end of the cables and turned my car off so I could put the battery cover
back on without getting injured by any of the moving parts of my engine.
It was then that I noticed the eerie silence in our garage.
That’s right. She’d
turned her car off.
*faceplam*
“What are you doing?”
“Well, I wanted to…”
“TURN YOUR CAR BACK ON!!!”
Thankfully the Prius started up again but none of the
dashboard displays would work. I
encouraged her to just bite the bullet and take it into the dealership rather
than a discount oil change place because the guys at the dealership are
actually trained on the maintenance of her vehicle. Reluctantly, she agreed and headed off.
I sighed, packed up my jumper cables, and went to work.
Now…don’t you wish your life were even half as exciting as
mine???
- HistoryDiva
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