First off, I am not currently myself a motorist. I'm between cars - namely, I am between the imaginary car I have never owned and my next, purely hypothetical vehicle. I know very little about cars - so long as it has at least three doors and five wheels, I'm happy.
My good friend Mike, though? He owns the s**t out of a car. He may not understand how any of the strange machinery in its belly makes its wheels turn and its five-disc CD player play CDs, but he sure knows how to sit in the driver's seat and turn that wheel. I assume the wheel is some kind of go-faster crank.
When Mike came over to visit and decided at 8:30 in the Goddamn morning that we absolutely without question had to have Taco Bell for breakfast, we jumped into his car and he turned the key, at which point the car made a sound such as a chain-smoking robot might make.
It was worrying.
It took a couple of minutes but Mike finally got the car to start, and as we'd arrived at Taco Bell fifteen minutes before they'd opened we decided to drive up to the nearest auto parts store and see if they could identify the problem.
They did, quickly and with some ease - it was the battery. It was nearly dead. Lovely. They quickly sold Mike a brand-spanking new battery and some circles (the circles, I can only assume, are part of some weird alchemical ritual which must be performed, otherwise the car will reject its new organ), and they even offered to replace the battery for us, given that Mike and I have the combined car knowledge of a concussed squirrel.
A man came out, lifted the hood, looked at the old battery for a moment, then went back inside. He didn't come out for some time. In fact after about fifteen minutes we peered in through the window to find him serving other customers. I admire the man's dedication to customer service, but there was a whole other representative at least twice his size standing at the other til looking at his finger nails and whistling to himself. I believe he was whistling a tune from the hit movie "Annie".
After another eight-or-so minutes, Mike decided to walk back into the store and inform the man who was supposed to be inserting the new battery that he hadn't actually inserted the battery yet. At this point the guy's colleague walked over and gently informed Mike that the sun will indeed come out tomorrow (which, this being southern California, is more or less a given).
Mike stepped out again, and was shortly thereafter followed by the guy whose sole contribution to our automotive adventure over the last 40 minutes was to open the hood of the car and glare at a dead battery. After glaring at the dead battery some more and deducing that, yes, it wasn't going to change itself, he dutifully took it out.
Then he vanished again. Not literally, I'm not suggesting he went *fup* and the air rushed to fill the vacant void where he had once stood. I am saying he retreated back into the store, probably to listen to his colleague list the various qualities he bets his birth parents have.
He emerged again after ten minutes and began to put the new battery into the car. Now, the key word in that sentence is "began". He started. He made an effort, and for that I will admire him always. But he seemed stumped by the fact that there was, in technical terms, a *bit* preventing the battery from fitting in the gap where a battery is supposed to go. It was like performing a heart transplant, only instead of the new heart fitting snugly in the gap the old one sat in, instead it sort-of leans half-inside the hole pulsating awkwardly.
He soon figured out that one of the bars designed to hold the battery in place was obstructing his effort, and then made an effort to move it by, I kid you not, hitting it with a wrench. This rather miraculously worked, in the same way that my mother sticking a screwdriver in the loading slot of our old VCR player managed inexplicably to get the ancient device reading media again.
It took AutoZone five minutes to sell my friend a new battery, and nearly a full hour for them to make good on their promise to install the thing. The store wasn't particularly busy either, this being a Sunday morning. To make matters worse, the Taco Bell had apparently opened at 8am, so we could have gone straight there anyway. Somehow this is AutoZone's fault, I just know it.
If you have a car and find yourself needing to replace an item such as a battery or an air freshener, these guys will identify the problem fairly promptly and sell you exactly what you need. Just don't expect them to rush to your aid if you need help installing the thing, even when they tell you they'll do exactly that. read more