Car Battery

Hissy wouldn’t start up on Tuesday, just made those clicky noises. It wasn’t clear that there was any cause for it, no lights left on or anything else to drain it overnight. It just was about 99% dead.

It’s almost five years since we bought her, so it’s not that much of a surprise. And it was a pleasure to see how easy it was to get to the battery, remove it , and replace it. On my 20+ year old minivan you have to disassemble half the engine compartment to get at the battery to begin with. Honda made it easy.

That’s the good news.

But what it got me thinking about was the fact that we didn’t have any warning. In fact, Hissy just went in for her annual work a month ago and they did their normal “1,823-point courtesy check-up” to make sure everything was hunky dory (and find things that weren’t so they could charge us to fix them) and this didn’t get flagged. In addition, today after fixing that one of the wiper blades started to shred and fall apart. Shouldn’t that have been found in an all-points inspection as well?

Just to be clear, I don’t bring this up as an indictment of the dealer’s service department. They’ve done real well by us recently and I’m not unhappy. But I do see a parallel with this and what’s going on with the world, or at least how I’m perceiving it. (Or maybe my brain is doing pattern matching and finding coincidences where there really aren’t any.)

But this whole situation where you can know that there’s a potential issue with A, B, and C and you do the regular maintenance and you check to make sure you’re good – and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, shit goes sideways anyway? I get it, I’m not an idiot, I understand that we’re not eliminating problems, just lowering the odds, but jeeze Louise, it’s annoying!

And “the world” right now, where we’re already leaking oil like a sieve, have two flat tires, the engine’s making some awful squealing noises, the radio won’t play anything other than elevator music, the windows won’t roll down or up, and the air conditioning is just blowing hotter and hotter air? If we’re already in that condition, how fast can the next big breakdown be and just how bad can the consequences be?

Seriously, might be time for a major tune-up and oil change. And maybe a whole new pit crew and set of mechanics!