"Sanettika" (sanettika)
11/03/2014 at 17:11 • Filed to: Spaceship
1
0|
"Sanettika" (sanettika)
11/03/2014 at 17:11 • Filed to: Spaceship | 1
| 0 |
So, I've been being a terrible person and have put off fixing the front end of my car because money. It's something I need more of. Well...Friday night I got to work and realized that one of my headlights was out. Meh. I had other things to worry about, I had to close out the books before I left work because they were doing inventory Saturday morning. Twelve hours later, I finally got to leave. I was not happy, but I had a donut in my hand, the promise of delicious Thai food and other entertainment at home, and best of all, it was daylight out again, so I could drive home without my missing headlight being noticed.
This morning finally came prowling around like some sort of betentacled, oozing horror, and my headlight still wasn't fixed. I have to go to work later. In the dark. Unable to procrastinate any more, off to the House of Wal I went. Ah, here we go, lighting and acceOH GOOD GODS HEADLIGHTS ARE BLOODY EXPENSIVE. Keep in mind, the last time I had to buy a headlight, it was for a 1987 Toyota pickup. You know, the big square kind that's all one unit and you just plug the damn thing in and it works. Kind of like the rest of a 1987 Toyota pickup. Not this flimsy little fairy of a thing that looks like your grandmother's favorite Christmas ornament that the cats shattered while trying to turn the tree into their own personal jungle gym. I bought blinker lights, too. At least those were sort of recognizable, a round orange thing with a plug on the bottom. A weird plug, but still a plug. I could figure those out.
Pictured: Not a headlight.
So I drove home with the precious-as-gold headlights, and the blinker bulbs, and body wash because I needed it, and 44 bottles of Kiwi Strawberry flavored sparkling water, because you buy that crap when you find it, otherwise you'll go for months without ever seeing it again. I'm sitting in the parking lot outside of my apartment with the sad, mangled hood of the Taurus up, looking at what's left of my headlight assembly. There is no obvious way to remove it. Oh. Yes, there is, they just haven't designed the thing to be easy to figure out at all. Two little bolts there, and there, and the thing should come apart. Tools are required. I don't know why I even have a toolkit, I don't fix things. When I fix things, they break more. I fix things when I want them to never, ever work again.
I took off the two little bolts, and the whole assembly came tumbling out, like a closet full of toys in the old cartoons (not these crappy new cartoons with some sort of dubious lesson hidden away behind the story, but the good old ones where the old man shot at the duck but the duck had his finger down the barrel of the gun and the whole thing blew up). Ok, so we twist this ring and then pull on that and OH GOD I'VE BROKEN IT. I was holding the headlight assembly. The main wire bundle snaked off into the hidden inner depths of the engine compartment, the plug end hanging limply out of the hole where the headlight should be, looking like some sort of severed eyeball nerve. Well...this is good, I've broken the whole damn thing. Whatever, I was going to figure out how it went together at least, make it a sort of learning experience, even if the only thing I learned was how to further destroy a broken Ford headlight. I grabbed both ends and pulled, just trying to tear the thing apart, and...oh, so the bulb just pops out like that. What do you know? Ok. Well, now that it's apart, it should go back together the same way, right?
It did! Put the bulb in the hole, put the ring on the bulb, plug the bulb in, shove the thing back in the hole and put the bolts where the bolts go. Fascinating. I actually managed to change a headlight on a somewhat modern car without breaking anything, and IT FELT GOOD. It even works, I tested it out. The blinkers, too! They were easy though, especially since they don't actually attach to anything anymore. Whatever mechanism they're supposed to use to stay in place was destroyed with the rest of the front of the car, so they just kind of perch in their little sockets with nothing but gravity to hold them there, like happy, blinking little orange birds. So now I have a car with two headlights that turn on, blinkers that blink, body wash so that I can go to work not smelling like some sort of wild creature, and forty-four bottles of Kiwi Strawberry flavored water.
Forty. Four. Bottles. That was all they had. And now I want more delicious Thai food.