Auto Car Wrecks

   I'm a staunch believer in laughing at the things that would otherwise make you cry. So, along that vein, let me tell you a funny story before I suffer a psychotic episode.     As most of you know, I currently make my living as a courier. I drive around all day, delivering items from point A to point B(oondocks). I've delivered everything from payroll to office supplies, human tissue to tires, pharmaceuticals to bank bags and I drive a lot! On average, I travel about 300 miles each day. Or 75,000 miles per year! Let's put that in perspective. Each year I drive the equivalent of three times around the planet. And I do this all in my own car. Awesome! Anyway, what all this driving means is that I have to do things more often than most. If YOU drive a lot in a week, you might need to fill up your gas tank twice. I have to fill mine every day. Sometimes twice! YOU go 3000 miles or 3 months before changing your oil. I go 3000 miles or 2 weeks. YOU might be able to make it three years or more before you need new tires. I have to get new after about 6 months. Stuff wears out faster. I risk more tickets cause I'm on the road about six times more than the average driver. I found all of this out pretty quickly after starting this job.     Prior to the winter of 2010 it had been a pretty easy job. Loads of fuel, but nothing major apart from a mystery clunking in my front suspension. Mostly it was mysterious because I hadn't bothered to have it checked. I knew it had something to do with my suspension, but that was about it. Eventually though, my deliveries took me to an auto shop where I asked them to take a look at it. "You have a worn out lower ball joint, and a broken tie rod. Also, sigma tau theta, epsilon pi zeta." I knew the first bit was in English, but as far as my knowledge on cars went, it might as well have all been Greek. In fact, all I really understood was that they wanted $600 to fix a little clunking. Thanks, but I'll pass. I bought my first set of new tires not long after that, and reveled in the feeling of not fish-tailing every time I crossed an overpass. My excitement was short lived though. My car began acting erratic and soon became nearly impossible to accelerate. I made the rookie mistake of taking it to the dealership where they charged me $90 just to tell me what was wrong with it and that it would cost another $2400-3200 to repair. Fuck a duck in a light blue truck! Erin and I wrestled over what to do. I won cause I had wrestled in high school, but we still didn't know what to do about the car. Should we repair it, or buy a new one? Would we get anything on a trade-in with a broken engine? Lame ducks for sale! Lame ducks! In the end we opted to go the repair route. However, we switched to a mechanic that my parents used and who offered to do the work for substantially less. Plus, he explained to me the dangers of driving on my suspension problem and I said to hell with it, might as well fix it all. To this day, I'm still not clear about what was fixed. It had something to do with a bad cylinder and pitting on the flux capacitor that lead to the ballcock valve of the overflow circuit. My mechanic had never seen anything like it. Ha! That's because on the rare occasions that things go bad for me, they do so spectacularly! Regardless, we left it with our guy and he repaired it. And repaired it. And repaired it a little longer. Honestly, what he really did is better defined as waiting. Three times his shop had to re-order the parts because Daimler-Chrysler had them packaged incorrectly. Oh what brilliance! What confidence inspiring business practices! Huzzah, Chrysler! Huzzah! Nonetheless, after over three months of waiting, my car was up and running again. The engine purred and the ride was smooth. I was ready to give Erin back her car and put mine to work again. After all, I still had brand new tires! Alas, Fate had different plans.    It now being April, those epic storms so common to Indiana springs were sweeping through. Up in our new house in Arcadia, Erin and I were scrambling to gather up the animals and move us all to the cellar since the tornado sirens were wailing. JUST as Erin was stepping through the back door, half of one of the three large maples in our front yard came crashing down on my car, blanketing it in leaves and limbs. I'd had the car back for two weeks. I recall how in the light of the next morning I thought of Charlie Brown and the kite eating tree. My tree apparently had greater appetites. With the help of our neighbors, I cut and cleared the tree away until I could finally see all of the damage. The final assessment: the roof was warped and buckled, a smashed taillight, a shorn off side mirror, a dented hood and front fender, a broken headlight, numerous scratches, and a spider-webbed windshield. Nothing too terrible. Certainly nothing to keep me from driving it. The insurance company's assessment was a little different though since they totaled the car out. I wasn't too torn up about that however since the check they cut covered the remainder of my car loan, and left enough to buy the car back on a salvage title as well as pay for the parts for me to make it road worthy again. The car was still beat up and ugly, but my car payment was gone and my insurance was less. If only that had marked the start of good things to come.     Let me move through the next several events quickly. On my way to South Bend, I received a speeding ticket and promptly forgot about it until several months later when being pulled over by ANOTHER state trooper. He informed me that 1) I'd been speeding 2) my license was suspended for failure to pay my other ticket and 3) it was illegal to drive with a cracked windshield, my one major holdout from the tree incident since I could find no one willing to replace it due to the buckled roof. He gave me a verbal warning for the windshield, a written warning for the speeding, and a ticket for driving without a license. Thank you officer. I'll get this taken care of right away. On the very morning of my planned trip up to pay for the original ticket, I get pulled over. This time It was for an expired plate. Son of a bitch! Oh, and because I'm driving on a suspended license, they're also going to impound my vehicle, leaving me at the side of the road with all of my courier jobs for that day. My routing department at work sends another courier to pick me up, and together we complete my day. Of course then I got to start working through the red tape of getting my car back. The impound lot would not release my car without proof of a valid license which meant finding a ride to take me an hour and a half north of Indy. My dad came to my rescue, playing the part of the hero and shuttling me around to various stops over the course of that afternoon and the other necessary to get my ducks in a row. I bought him lunch. Twice. And made a silent promise to find him the best retirement community his money can buy when he's gone senile. ;) Love you, Da. So, with one ticket paid, my plates renewed, and an unreasonable sum forked over to the impound lot, I'm free to take care of the other tickets on my own. Ticket number two had the charges dropped by the superior court it was held in because I'd resolved the issue promptly. Ticket number three, I wasn't so lucky. I paid fines for two offenses and court costs. Bugger.     It's around this time that my car starts making intermittent noises like a diesel and the check engine light starts appearing randomly. Having learned my lesson about ignoring noises, I take the car back to my mechanic. As luck goes though, that day the car performed fine. The fuel injectors were a bit noisy but nothing like what I'd been hearing. Roughly two weeks later, on my way into work, my "electrical system failure" light came on. This meant one of two things; the battery I'd just bought a few months before had already died, or my alternator was about to go. I put my money on the alternator and spent the day performing "one of the easier mechanical repairs." Easy that is unless your car happens to be one  of those designed by the monkeys at Daimler-Chrysler. Where most cars have their alternators located up on top of the engine compartment, the Dodge Caliber's is snugged up in the middle, tightly fit behind the AC compressor. Terrific! Anyway, I got it fixed and the car ran like new. Until I crashed it. Seriously.     It's mid February and I'm on my way into our office. I'm on the tail-end of a minor chest cold; cough, runny nose, congestion. No big deal. Except that on that morning, with traffic backing up on southbound 37, I sneeze. I sneeze all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. Sometimes I've sneezed 12+ times in a row. I've tasted blood after finishing with a sneezing fit. This time though I sneezed up a wad of phlegm. Yeah, I could have swallowed it. I could have rolled down my window and spit it out into the freezing air. But that's not what I did. I was warm and comfortable. My body was obviously trying to expel whatever this mucus was carrying. So, I reached down into my passenger side footwell, and grabbed an old fast food bag to spit into. It's at this moment that the slowly moving traffic transformed to stopped traffic and I, not watching, didn't see in time to stop. I hit my brakes, just not in time, and rear ended the Envoy I'd been following. They in turn hit the car in front of them, who hit the car in front of them. It was a lovely little mess that everyone drove away from but me. I was fine, but my sad little abused Caliber had had its front grill and the radiator and radiator fans crunched in by the Envoy's bumper. We were going nowhere on our own power. I had the car towed home, got it into the garage, and there it still sits.    Quickly now; my sister loaned us her old car that had failed due to alternator issues. I replaced it and got it running again. Erin drove it while I started using her Caliber. The alternator on her Caliber started going. Luckily, I had a nearly new alternator I could replace it with. Next came the AC in the Grand Prix borrowed from my sister; it just blew hot air so I had to put in 24 oz of new refrigerant before it would start cooling again. Then, just this July 4th, the Prix overheated. Its coolant reservoir was dry despite having just filled it a month before. I thought it was the lower intake manifold gasket and spent a day disassembling the upper bit of the engine to find that the coolant leak wasn't from the gasket (which I now had to replace anyway) but was from a tiny little $5 pvc tubing elbow. The coolant had corroded the plastic until it broke open, spilling all the coolant. I replaced it and re-assembled the engine. Now it didn't run properly. Fuck me. My cousin believed it to be a vacuum system leak so I scoured the parts I'd dealt with for problems and found them. Broken fuel injector o-rings, bad seals between gaskets, split rubber connectors, faulty mass air flow and manifold air pressure sensors, dirty air filter. The issues kept piling up and getting fixed until at some point it all came together and the car started working again. In fact, it seems to be working even better than before. I'm so pleased with how it turned out that I can ALMOST forget about how I've come full circle. The ball joint on the Caliber has gone bad. Different Caliber, same joint. I started working on it last night. It's proving to be more problematic than expected.  *sigh* I miss riding my bike to work.