Lesson Learned

Have you ever done something that was so painful at the time....and then once time passed and the sheer awfulness subsided, you could laugh about it later? I mean, really laugh about it and mark it down in history as one of the worst, yet funniest things you've done? Well, I lived through this a week ago. Now that everything is resolved, I frequently giggle when I think about this situation and how the Wesebaum sisters got themselves into this whole mess.

It started last Wednesday morning when I was out running errands (minus Emily, thankfully, while Bryan was on vacation). My car wouldn't start, and to make a long story short, my sister, Catherine, came to the rescue with jumper cables in hand to get my car started and take it to the repair shop. Although I had taken an emergency car 'class' in college (and forgot all of the useful information), Cath assured me that she knew what she was doing. While we were in the process of hooking everything up, two nice men came out of stores at the shopping center where we were to help (maybe it looked like two blondes didn't know what they were doing??!).

So we hooked it up, tried to jump my car, but it only lost juice and completely died. Thank goodness we had AAA to the rescue! We called them, asked for the towing services, and decided to go grab lunch in Cath's car while we waited the 30 minutes. That is....until her car wouldn't work. The power steering wouldn't work, and she couldn't turn the car. Seriously?? One broken car is enough to deal with - not two! The guy from AAA showed up and started my car fine, but looked at Cath's and said there was a serious problem.

So we carefully got her car across across the street to a Walmart to have them check out the battery. As the guy was hooking it up, we interrupted him to let him know that he wasn't hooking the tool up to the battery. He kindly responded and said that he in fact was and that the part we pointed to was the computer system controls. Our jaws dropped to the ground, and we went numb. Are you kidding me??? We jumped the car from the computer system??? NOT THE BATTERY??? Oh my gosh... The man continued the test but couldn't resolve the problem and recommended that we go to the dealer to have it looked at.

Fast forward to this past Monday when the dealer could finally look at Cath's car. They told her that it might not be covered under warranty (and told us to never tell the truth about what we did....!), and it could be costly. We both were praying for days that it would be covered. All we could see were $$$ signs.

Fortunately Cath decided to research the problem and discovered that 1 simple (and cheap!) part might be the answer (she also found that other people with her car model made the same mistake and mistook the computer box for the battery). Apparantly we blew a fuse when jumping, and it had to be reset. So she and my dad rescued her car from the dealership, bought the part for $9.71, installed it, and voila - it's fixed! Thank goodness for 2 engineers! What a HUGE sigh of relief!!

In the meantime, my car died several more times, so we decided to retire it after its nice, long life. We're currently in the midst of purchasing a new car, and soon I'll have a reliable ride once again - yipeee!

So...let this be a lesson learned: ALWAYS know WHERE your car battery is (even if there's a box with a red '+' sign: this doesn't mean that it's the battery!) BEFORE jumping someone else's car. It will save you ALOT of headache. Trust me.