There’s gonna be a trip outta town coming soon for me. My car went into the shop and got the front wheels aligned, two new tires on the front, the brakes checked, a new belt of some kind, all the fluids changed or filled, and a new battery.
A guy with grease in his knuckles says it is road-worthy.
Trouble on the way home. The radio won’t play, and the dashboard lights keep fading when I stop and go.
Next morning, I go back to the repair shop. I explain to the fella at the desk. He says ‘scuse me jist a minute and goes back to the work area. When he comes back, there is a knot in his jaw like a walnut.
Well, ma’am, the thing with the radio will have to be a Dealer fix. You see, the mechanic forgot to put the car on the charger while he was doing the battery. This means that you will have to go to your dealer (this is really sounding wrong, somehow) and get the code to give the radio instructions. It is actually part of the anti-theft system, so that if anyone tries to take the radio out, it won’t play for anyone else. It is part of this car from the factory, and needs the proper security code. The dealer should not charge you for this, and if you get there and they give you any flak, have them call me, as he handed me the card with the phone number on it.
So I go over a few blocks, get directions for which door to pull in. The service manager was quite polite, and I played at being dumb about why won’t the radio work after we got a new battery. He said there should be a little card in with the owner’s manual, and if I didn’t have that little card with its number, and since we hadn’t bought the car at that dealership, they would have to take some time to look it up.
I dumped out the contents of the glove box. Owner’s manual in a special case. File folder with all sorts of maintenance papers. And tucked into the back corner so far that I had to flex the side of the plastic, was a little orange card. With the code written on it.
The man came around to the passenger side and got in. He said he would talk me through it. Since we hadn’t bought the car there, if he did it, he would have to charge me, but there would be no harm in telling me how, right? There are times when I gotta love those who move outside the authority.
We found the correct pages in the manual, then he pointed to the card and explained how I should fill in clicks of the button according to number from card and put it onscreen. I got the idea that this could be a logic and Algebra problem in another scene.
Golly, this was complicated. I wrote the number on the correct page within the owner’s manual, security be damned if I wanted to go through this again just because we had to jumpstart the van, and/or I was going out of town.
Today, Husband cleaned the ins and outsides of the windows and put Rainex on the windshield. That stuff is great for storms because the water just seems to glide off the glass. Then we went to the auto parts store and got new wiper blades and floor mats. Then over to the car wash for the supersux vacuum. The pine needles from the Christmas wreath are finally gone from the trunk in time for a Memorial Day trip!
Gonna go! Husband wants to make a trip to WALMART to get air filters for the furnace/air conditioner. The service tech is coming tomorrow, as per contract.
~~love and Huggs, Diane
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