Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Take on the 'dead' battery

Sometimes you just have one of those days..  I get up this morning at 6AM, I shower, get dressed and walk down to the car at about 6:15AM to start it up and let it get warm as I put in a car-seat and clean out some crap from the backseat.    I turn the car off and go back in the house and return about 10 minutes later ready to head off.   Problem is that now the car won't turn on.. I don't hear clicking sounds and am not getting any impression that the battery is dead but just when I turn the key, the lights on the dashboard turn on but nothing else happens.    My first thought is a dead-battery of course but as I had just started it up 10 minutes later this doesn't seem plausible.

After some wiggling of the steering wheel it finally turns over and the engine is purring like a kitten..   of course this gets me out of my immediate bind of not getting to work on time but the bigger underlying issue remains which is that I now have a car which only starts if I press control-alt-delete.   

I bring it to the dealership for service and of course as soon as I get there and explain the issue, the service guy asks me to turn it on which…..of course it does without any issue.   We run through this exercise a couple more times and each time the car turns on as soon as the key is turned.   I swear to him that this happened earlier in the day and he says that he'd like to keep the car overnight and try it a couple of times throughout the day.

Obviously we know how this is going to end..    this dude calling me tomorrow to say they can't find anything wrong with the car, me picking up the car and then having it stall out on me on Thursday morning so I can head back to the dealership for the same circus act again.

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