Bringing back the dead
Believe it or not, I have never had a dead
battery in all my 21+ years of driving a car.
So when I stepped outside after a workout with friends, my exact words
were, “Tina! My car won’t start! Help!!!”
Tina is a rather resourceful woman, a lovely
friend, and was also quick to respond with jumper cables. She turned her car around so that our
vehicles were nose to nose, pulled the cables from her trunk, and handed them
to me.
As it turned out, neither one of us knew
exactly what we were doing which must have been quite a sight—two sweaty women
in brightly colored clothes standing there in a parking lot, trying to look
confident but entirely afraid of blowing ourselves into smithereens.
“Why isn’t there a poem or something to
remember how to hook up these cables?” I asked.
I felt like a complete moron.
With the wonderment of the smart phone comes
unlimited answers, and while sifting through the various pages, each claiming
that they offered “the only safe way to jumpstart a car,” I realized that no
two methods were the same.
There were pictures and how-to videos and
step-by-step detailed instructions that were all completely different from all
of the other ones. Frustrated, we began
calling people we thought could help us and realized their methods were all
different as well. Finally, a man pulled
up in his car near us and I thought we had been saved.
“Excuse me,” I asked. “We think we’re going to explode ourselves
and wondered if you could help us jump my car.”
He kindly got out to help, stood there and
scratched his head and said, “I haven’t done this in awhile.” I politely excused him without demanding he
hand over his man-card and he drove away.
Tina and I were on our own, but being two educated women who had just done
two hours of weights and cardio, there was no way we shouldn’t be able to
succeed.
Following one person’s instructions, we
connected the cables as we were directed to do.
No luck.
We readjusted and finally, with a few last
second prayers, I turned the key to my beloved vehicle and heard it turn over
and start up. Being women we did not
high five or “bro hug.” We full out
embraced each other and jumped up and down and cheered like goobers and held
our heads a little higher. Ingenuity,
the ability to ask questions, and good ol’ girlfriend teamwork had prevailed
once again.
(Because I am one who needs those poems or pneumonic
devices in order to remember how to do things, here’s my Public Service
Announcement for the week: Love Root
Beer? Drink Root Beer. Live car- connect
red, then black. Dead car, red, then
black. Feel free to write that on your
man-card, should you need it.)
Written/published 8/31/14
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