We left very early this morning to drop Ferris off at the airport.
It was about 5:00 a.m.. My wife and I were enjoying our first cup of coffee on the road while Ferris knotted off in the backseat.
We sipped our warm java and talked about silly things, as we tend to do, when the sunroof opened… by itself.
I closed it.
We looked at each other – odd.
It started to open again, this time I caught it before it got fully opened.
Odd.
The last time it opened, it didn’t stop. It opened fully. And nothing we did would close it.
I feverishly pushed the buttons, then tugged at the glass, then pushed the button while tugging at the glass. Ferris was groaning in the back – of course he was pretty much getting cold air full in the face.
Luckily for us it was a balmy 33°.
After shivering for a short time, I fashioned a partial wind block from the back floor mat and a long ice scraper. This worked relatively well and we made the rest of the hour-long drive a bit chilly but without incident.
We saw Ferris off and waited for his plane to depart. It didn’t take long, maybe an hour and a half all told.
On the way back to the car we plotted on better ways to keep the air out on the way home, and joked that we were lucky it was not raining… or snowing.
In the car – I poured us a refill of warm coffee from the thermos I had prepared for the ride. My chilly wife started the car.
Tick tick tick.
You know that sound.
May as well have been.
Tsk tsk tsk.
I guess the sunroof never stopped trying – even tho the car was off.
During this time a guy was getting into his car in an adjacent space. There was no way he did not hear the ticking, or notice me standing outside of the car looking forlorn. He walked around his car a couple of times, putting things in the trunk and such, and then he left. Not a word, not even an acknowledgement. He could have simply looked up and said – sorry I don’t have cables… sheesh.
In the meantime, my patient wife continued to turn the key – every so often getting a grrrr out of the engine, making her more hopeful than worried.
I began wandering around looking for the ‘airport guy’.
I finally found him in his truck. On the side of the truck was lettered.
Airport Courtesy
Battery jumps, tire inflations…
And some other stuff I didn’t bother to read… I had my answer!
I asked for a jump.
The kind and willing to help ‘airport guy’ was a bit older than one might expect for someone having a job which may require heavy work in the bitter cold. So old in fact, he couldn’t quite squeeze the jumper grips wide enough to fit over the battery post, and he was shaking so badly that when he did manage to get them wide enough he kept missing his mark. It took all of my self-control not to grab the things from him. But he was a kind man, and so I waited.
While he was repeatedly attempting to attach the cables, I noticed the red clip was badly corroded. Our feeble, shaky airport guy overlooked this detail and continued on. Because of this corrosion he made several attempts to reconnect the cables on both his car and ours… each time repeating the shaking and the missing. I am so patient.
At one point, I suggested that the problem lie in the cable rather than the car, I did it in my best ‘I am only a woman suggesting to you the man what might only possibly be something you may want to consider which you probably were already considering because you are so clever’ voice.
He scraped off the cable until he got a spark, then again after missed several attempts, hooked them back up. The car turned over in a jiffy.
Yay.
I reinstalled the car mat/ ice scraper wind block device, and off we went, bypassing the house and directly to the mechanic.
All is well now. The sunroof is closed – and disabled. We can revisit that in June.
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