So, last weekend my wife and I were out running some errands, and we hit a pothole just after turning the corner into a Shopping Clusterfuck Area. Translation: we hit a relatively small bump at about ten miles an hour on a road that was barely more than the leftover pavement between like eight parking lots.
What Happens When Most People Hit A Pothole:
Option A: Absolutely fucking nothing of any consequence. Maybe somebody in the car spills a drink or something.
Option B: They get a flat tire. It gets changed. They continue on, maybe fifteen minutes later than they'd expected to be.
What Happened When We Hit A Pothole:
The car instantly died and rolled to a halt. Several of the Impending Doom lights on the dash came on, and the odometer went blank. Not only did the car refuse to start again, it wouldn't even pretend like it was fucking
trying.
After I pushed the car around the corner
all by myself like a total badass with the help of a couple other people who had to stop behind us when the car died, I used my brilliant powers of observation and deduction to see if anything under the hood looked like it had fucking blown up or fallen off. Also, I mashed down all the fuses and checked the battery to see if it had come loose. Then I called AAA, who said they'd never even heard of that happening before.
We began to detect a theme in our interactions that afternoon when the tow truck showed up and the driver did exactly the same shit I had just done, then told me he'd never seen anything like this before. He also had some kind of weird Tourette's where he kept saying "GPS" all the time, but didn't actually
use it. Or listen when we tried to tell him where to go.
Driver: I have GPS. I'll just use my GPS. Do you know where you're going? Because I have GPS.
Us: Turn here.
Driver: [keeps going]
Us: Um...
Driver: GPS.
After a brief tour of one of the least interesting parts of Denton, he finally dropped my car off vaguely near the shop, as it would apparently have been impossible for him to get it to the actual garage door due to the slight incline that he insisted somehow canceled out his truck's Giant Extending Ramp. Instead, a mechanic had to push it the rest of the way. When he had accomplished that, he called us back and showed us this:
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"Have you had any work done recently?"
"Um, an oil change and an alignment."
""That doesn't make any damn sense. It didn't fall up." |
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It turned out that the bolt wasn't even
from my car, so apparently what happened was this:
Somehow, a random bolt fell into my engine and probably got lodged in there somewhere. Then we hit a pothole, which caused the bolt to bounce around in exactly the right way that it connected the starter to something else metal, creating a short circuit that temporarily fried the computer and pissed off the anti-theft system so much that the whole thing refused to function until it was reprogrammed. At an improbability factor, I might add, of 2
267709 to 1 against.
Except, if you're me, probability is a fucked-up algorithm that takes the normal laws of math and science and twists them into some hideous perversion that almost guarantees that the weirdest shit in the universe will
always happen to me, while the probability that anything else will happen is often inversely proportional to how much I want or need it to.
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If I had a dollar for every time I've heard a mechanic say "I've never seen this happen before,"
I could probably buy a new car. Two weeks later, it would burn up in the driveway because it
was landed on by a bald eagle that was on fire after being struck by lightning in midair. |
Like the time that what I swear must have been an albatross bombed my windshield while I was driving down the road at 55 mph, perfectly illustrating the week I had been having.
Or the time someone decided to back out of a parking spot without looking and didn't even stop when I laid on the horn, so I threw my car into reverse and peeled out backwards, and somehow they only hit my front license plate.
From the side.
Or the time my gas pedal got stuck at about 20 mph a few months after I bought my car.
Or the time my gas gauge got stuck at half a tank, and suddenly dropped down to empty at the exact moment I got too far into the middle of nowhere to make it to a gas station.
Or the time it was so fucking cold that I had half a tank of gas, but most of it
actually fucking froze, and I got stuck in the middle of nowhere and my brother had to bring me some HEET to fucking thaw the rest of it out.
Or the time I got the oil changed in my wife's car and a few days later the oil filter
fell the fuck off while she was driving.
Seriously, this is my life, all the time. I can't even make this kind of shit up.
