Well I briefly mentioned my car dying using a quick post from my Treo the night it happened (Friday), but here’s the whole story.
My car’s alternator had recently been replaced, as it was whining. Shortly after, I started hearing sounds again, but this time it was more of a grinding sound and the shop said that it was the A/C compressor. Since it was for A/C and it’s the winter and I’d been spending a lot lately, I decided to put it off. On Thursday night, the car stalled once but I was quickly able to get it started again. The next day I noticed that the battery light was on. I assumed that the alternator they put in was bad or installed improperly and decided to take it in the next day.
Well, on Friday night on the way home, I was on 101 South, just past the exit for San Tomas Expressway when the radio suddenly went silent. My first thought was that the radio station was having trouble. Then my stereo beeped a few times and displayed an error, which it normally only does when it has trouble reading a CD. A couple of seconds later, the lights started to dim and there was a definite loss of power. I quickly got the car over to the right, to the strip between the highway and the next freeway onramp. Crap. I quickly put on the 4-way flashers, but they were rapidly dimming along with all the dashboard lights.
Luckily I had some battery-operated and crank-operated flashlights, with a flash setting, so I got them going and put them on the roof of the car, my main worry being that someone might slam into me. I had a failed attempt at using one of those portable battery-operated starter gadgets. I called my wife and had her call AAA to get a tow truck. It’s really hard to talk on a cell phone with cars and trucks whizzing by you at 70 miles per hour.
Then I heard a bunch of sirens. I didn’t think much of it until they all started getting on the freeway within eyeshot. And then they all started stopping, over by Mission College, still within eyeshot. Weird. Another accident?
After 30 minutes or so, the AAA tow truck showed up and we loaded my car. The tow truck driver mentioned that hey, at least I was lucky that I was not involved in the accident just up the road. “What happened”, I inquired? “A nine car pile-up”. Within eyeshot of where my car just died. Weird. Then I wondered if my wife might see or hear about the accident on the news and might think that I was involved in it. Not wanting to worry and wanting her to avoid that area, I gave her another call.
We towed the car to Stevens Creek Nissan and I met my wife there. The tow truck guy hooked a battery charger up to my battery which gave me enough juice to drive the car up to the door by the service department. He left the battery charger hooked up and sitting on top of my battery so I had to drive with the hood wide open, peering through the gap at the bottom, which was kind of fun. I filled out the service form, put the keys in the envelope, and dropped them in the slot.
As my wife and I were getting ready to get in the car to go to dinner, a car pulls up and just sits there, stopped in the rightmost lane of Stevens Creek, a very busy road. Now I’m worried that we are either going to be the victims of a drive-by shooting or someone is going to slam into this car stopped in the middle of the busy road, thereby destroying my wife’s car. Well, it turns out that they just want directions. They have a map, but it’s evident from their map that 1) they are quite far away from the street they are trying to find. 2) The street they are trying to find is a tiny residential street and we don’t know that neighborhood at all. We give them some general directions. Meanwhile, a bunch of cars have come by, had a few near accidents with this stopped car and have begun a festival of honking, yelling, and angry looks. I do my best to direct my eyes over to this mess, to give these people an idea of the mess that they’ve created, so they’ll go. They are oblivious and ask lots of questions, which we can’t answer. Eventually, they do take off, but it’s some of the worst driving I’ve seen in ages. First, the guy sits there while there is a break in the traffic and then waits until a bunch of cars are coming and then he decides to go. Then he heads in the other direction, as we had directed them. Except that we thought they would make a U-turn at the next stoplight; they instead decided to make a U-turn right there in the middle of this huge road with a ton of traffic. I fully expected to witness nine car pileup number 2 at this point, but luckily they made it.
It just seemed to be a night for cars. Bad driving and car trouble.