Tonight has been a strange night. I got home and parked by the mailboxes to check the mail. Expecting nothing too exciting, I opened up my missives…junk…coupons…credit card bill. OK. It normally sucks, but this has been a good month :rip: HOLY MOTHER OF GOD! Over a thousand dollars! EEEP! Crap. There went Christmas presents. Apparently, my hotel and flights to Chicago after Christmas cleared two months early. Knew about the flights…not the hotel. Oh well. I'll scrounge it up somehow—I always seem to.
Get back into my car, turn the key, and … nothing. No lights, no clicks, just dead silence. Great. What next? Call friend X, in class. Call friend Y, voice mail. No local friends left, so here's to AAA. While waiting for the wrecker to come attempt to jump my car to life, I hiked the distance of the complex in my dress clothes (more importantly, my dress shoes with five inch heels) to get to my apartment to change.
The wrecker calls to say they've found my car, so I hike back, and lo and behold, jumping it works. Now the car's running…what to do? Go fix it for real. I went to the place down the street to have the battery checked since it was massively corroded, but they attempted to charge me $42 to hook it up to the machine to check it. Excuse me? Do I look that blonde? (DON'T YOU DARE answer that!) Thankfully, I had the foresight to leave the car running while checking this out, so I hauled myself over to Wally World keeping every possible appendage crossed that they would still be open.
Yippee, they were! I pulled in and asked the guy if he could check the battery, and he said that he could, so I asked him if it cost $42. He looked askance at me and replied, "Uh, no?" I told him the story of the neighboring place, and his response was eloquent: "SHIT!" My thoughts exactly. The battery ended up being totally dead, and I asked if he could fix it while I waited, mentally calculating the cost of the battery plus the credit card bill minus a month's worth of Ramen…and coming up negative. Boo.
After the battery was installed, I took the receipt in to the cashier, a little skeptical since the mechanic had told me to make sure to have the cashier to look at the receipt. (Um, OK?) I told the cashier, he played with the cash register for a bit, and I was on my way. For free. Apparently, the mechanic wrote it up somehow that made the math work. I don't know if he was looking for a date or just taking pity on me, but he'll probably never know exactly how heartfelt my thanks really were.
