It was an ordinary day. Wanted to take the Honda CRV to the carwash and told my wife I'd be back in 20 minutes. Opened the garage door, hopped in the car and pushed the start button. Funny noises came from everywhere. The headlights flashed and then everything went dead. Holy sh*t! I sat in the car for a few seconds and tried again. Same results. The only conclusion I could come up with was my battery was dead. It's happened before...many times since I have owned a car. But...it always seemed to have happened when I had another car sitting next to it in my two-car garage. About two weeks ago I took my little Mitsubishi Mirage out of the garage and my son and daughter-in-law stopped and took it home with them to see if they might be interested in buying it from me as a third car for their family. Both my wife Carol and I no longer work and find we haven't needed the use of the Mirage for a few months. All it is doing is taking up space which we could use for something else. The car is about 5 years old, but has only about 9,000 miles on it since I bought it new. No sense paying insurance on it, having to have it inspected every year and sitting in space we could use for something else in our garage. So, when the CRV wouldn't start, I finally found the reason for having the Mirage in my garage next to the CRV. I have long jumper cables hanging from a post in the garage, but they now did me no good, since only one car was now in the garage. Now what do I do? Got out my wallet and found my Central Penn AAA card and dialed the number for help. In about 10 minutes a truck pulled into my driveway and a friendly fellow headed toward my open garage door. He too turned the key and got the same response. He grabbed an instrument from his truck and attached both cables to my battery and told me it was just about dead. I could get it charged, but the chances are pretty good it wouldn't start the next time I needed it. So...he put in a new battery. The dead battery was the original battery and the car is over three years old now, so it had lasted me about as long as could be expected in a cold Northern state. But, if I still had my second car next to my CRV, I could have jumped it and perhaps taken it to a garage and had it charged. And, once again...when I tried to start it next week I'd have to do the same thing once again. Since I am a AAA member, I didn't have to pay for the service, but did have to pay for the battery. One way or another, I needed a new battery. I'm sure there will be another time in the near future when I will miss having two cars in my garage, but I'll eventually get used to it and can certainly use the extra money I will not need to spend to keep another car sitting in the garage and not being driven. Just seemed so funny that a few days after I got rid of my Mirage that something like this happened. Someone knew what I had done with the Mirage, and was just reminding me they knew. Life's funny that way. But, it is nice to know that someone is looking over your shoulder and giving you a reminder about it every so often. And, it wasn't a time that was an emergency, so it was a friendly reminder. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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