The setup: So for some background let me explain what my sister (whose name is Claudia) does. For those of you that don’t know her she works at the corporate headquarters of Publix Supermarkets that is about a forty-minute drive from home, mostly on the freeway. It’s a long drive out that’s about a third of the way across the state.
That being said, for a while now she has been having trouble with the battery in her car and the connections with the positive wire. Sometimes the car would not start and she would have to pop the hood and wiggle it to establish the connection. What I have come to find out is that it has been tougher and tougher to wiggle the wire to make it work. About two days ago I overheard my brother-in-law (whose name is Jeff) mention he was going to take off the red plastic cap that protects the connection and tighten the bolt. Let’s just say that never happened.
So it’s a new day and I’m at the local library writing the other blog entries you might or might not have read already. It’s just after 6 p.m. and I happen to be taking a break reading a magazine when Claudia calls me. I figure she is calling to let me know she’s on her way home and wondering what we’re going to watch on TV. (Yes, Claudia, Jeff and I all hang out at home and watch TV together.) Anyhoo, it turns out that she is having a seriously tough time trying to get the connection on her car battery to work. She has been twisting the cap and it doesn’t seem to want to start. Because of this she wants me to drive all the way to her job site to help her.
Let me remind you this is all happening while I’m at the local library. I don’t like the idea of being the guy on the phone in a public setting talking about how to start a car, especially in a place that requires a certain degree of silence. I’m also not going to lie. I did not want to drive forty minutes just to help her establish a clean connection for her car battery. Of course I wasn’t going to just blow her off and hang up either. What I did was tell her to wiggle it some more. Then I remembered what my Jeff had said earlier. I told her to take off the plastic covering the connection and carefully wiggle the wire. She said she would try it and call me back.
A few minutes go by and I get the call. She’s on the freeway and all is well. I can’t tell you how relieved I was. So you’re sitting here and wondering, “What the… is that the whole point of the story?” No, actually it is not. Aren’t you glad you kept reading?
Within five minutes of the second call I get a third call and I don’t even know what to think. As soon as I picked up everything changes. There is a sound of terror in my sister’s voice that only comes when something has gone wrong. I instantly freak out and ask what’s happened. It turns out that when she was playing with the battery she forgot to close the hood of the car with enough force to catch the latch that keeps it closed. When she picked up speed on the freeway the wind caught the hood and caused it to crash against the windshield with enough force to shatter it and throw the rearview mirror off the glass.
Of course at this point I’m getting all of my stuff together and heading towards the exit of the library. Claudia tells me she’s going to call my mother and that I should go pick her up. When I get home, my mom tells me that Jeff is going to pick Claudia up and that they will both drive back together. After all of this I am a bit amped up and I need to let off some steam. I decide to lift some weights. It’s not important what I did but let’s say I had a good workout. OK, enough about that.
So when Jeff and Claudia come home I see the damage and I’m a bit surprised at how much was done. The windshield is not completely shattered but it has cracks going all across the left side. The hood of the car is dented upward in a degree that would resemble someone lifting up tinfoil to see what is inside leftover tupperware. The first thing that Jeff decides to do is go after the toolbox to try and fix the hood. So naturally he picks up the hammer and starts whacking the underside of the hood. After a few well-placed hit nothing happens except some new small dents pop out the other side. I try to reason with him and after some brainstorming we decide to take off the hood and try things differently.
Imagine this if you can. You’re driving down a popular two-lane road through a neighborhood that I live in at about eight in the evening. It’s fairly dark and you see two grown men jumping up and down in the front yard of a home while a third person is shining a flashlight on something you can’t really make out but looks shiny and metallic. That was Jeff and I trying stomp out the dents from the hood. After three trials of jumping up and down, bolting the hood back to the car, realizing it didn’t fit and taking it off again we finally got it to fit back on. Sure there were some odd dents here and there but for all intents and purposes we felt like the goal was accomplished.
If you’re wondering what’s going to happen next, the insurance company is sending a glass replacement company to replace the broken windshield. I’m not sure about the hood but it was mentioned that we could go to a junkyard and find a replacement hood.
I’m looking back at this entry and I wonder if it was a story worth mentioning. I admit this is a blog that I control but at the same time I do want to entertain readers. My goal is not to bore but to bring a few smiles while letting people get to know me a bit. So I guess what I’m saying is please respond and let me know what you think. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
