I’m a Bad Ordnance Soldier

So Courtney calls me at work today. She had been home all of three hours, and went to her car and it wouldn’t start. “I need a new battery,” she says. “I’ll jump start you when I get home. You don’t need a new battery,” I says.

I clean the terminals, the connectors, etc. because I’m all fastidious and shit, then I try to jump start her car. It not only won’t start, but the clock doesn’t come on or anything. I figure she was right from the get-go and go buy her a new battery. I swap the batteries, put the key in the ignition, and…nada.

Then, after spending $101.11 on a new battery and driving all over Waipahu for an hour trying to find an auto parts store open, I do what any moron would have done to begin with. I check the connections and fuses. Sure as shit, there is an 80-amp fuse busted. It’s been raining for six weeks, and only after spending the scrilla does it occur to me that mayhaps it is a fuse. Cost of the real repair? $4.39.

When I was working at the DMMC (second definition), I would host the maintenance meetings, and I used to chew peoples’ asses for doing something like that. The old battery may well be dead (Courtney said the clock wasn’t working when she first tried to start it, and this is on a vehicle that started on the first try after her 6-month deployment with the battery hooked up), but I should still have checked the damn fuses.

~ by kinshay on 2006-04-04.