The Little Black Pony refused to start. It was frustrating. I’d just spent $1451 on the beast to fix its ignition coils and other assorted problems. Now I turn the key and I get the same response as I got from my last girlfriend when I’d nudge her in the middle of the night. Nothing.
The LBP has not given me trouble, for the most part. She’s a Kia Rio, evidently a valuable car because they’re not making her sisters anymore–something about the car being too cheap and too reliable. Yeah. The things that make us love a car make a manufacturer hate it.
But this was unacceptable. I knew I’d start paying large repair bills when she went over 120,000 miles. But I thought she’d spread them out.
She sat in the heat of my Barstow driveway. I called a tow truck and suggested they might want to bring a new battery. Sure, they said. Be there in an hour. Which turned into an hour and a half. I called. He’s fifteen minutes away. Then the storm hit Barstow and the streets started to flood. If I didn’t get going now, I’d be trapped in Barstow and unable to go to work. I called again. Oh, seven minutes they said. fifteen minutes went by.
On a whim, I went out and tried to start the car. Vrooooom. So I called and cancelled the tow truck. “Don’t you want to know why it’s doing that?” they asked. Sorry, I said. I’m 67 years old and only have a little more time left on this earth. I can’t squander it waiting for you to show.
A week later I go out to the parking lot of my office and once again, the LBP is giving me the cold shoulder. I call another tow truck company. They actually show up and jump the car. I drove to my son’s house, got a jump from him after visiting my beautiful granddaughters, then drove back to Barstow.
(My weekly routine is that I am in Barstow over the weekend, at my little apartment here in Loma Linda during the work week.)
The next morning I take the car—which miraculously starts–to Auto Zone. They test the batter and tell me it’s fully charged. “It’s the alternator,” the woman with the testing machine tells me. Great. Another $800 repair.
I call a mobile mechanic because it’s a Saturday and I need to drive to church to cantor the 4 o’clock Mass. This guy answers the phone and I tell him my woes.
“Let me call you back,” he says. Sure, I think. I’ll never hear from him again.
Five minutes later, the phone rings.
“The alternator for that car is $484 but I’m not sure I can find one here in Barstow,” he says. “But what you’re describing to me is not the alternator, otherwise you wouldn’t have made it from Glendale to Barstow. Why don’t you let me come over and run a diagnostic?”
“When can you be here?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Sure you will, I thought. But it was early enough in the day that I took a chance.
The guy showed up in … fifteen minutes.
He popped the hood and undid the protective cover for the battery. Immediately he wiggled the cable connected to the positive terminal. It was loose.
“There’s your problem,” he said. He worked his magic, then had his sixteen-year-old son check the rest of the system.
The Little Black Pony is running like a stallion these days. I have no fear when I turn the ignition.
It’s so nice to meet someone who knows what they’re doing. In this world, such people are few and far between.
Mark Bruce, Writer 