Car Problems

This week has been pretty bad for me getting into work already. I took Monday off, only came in a half day Tuesday, and was sick half of Wednesday and all of Thursday. As of Thursday night I had 12 hours of time in so I was going to have to work at least Saturday and maybe even Sunday.

The fun started Friday. I worked most of the day, but I had some errands to run and took off after about 8 hours of work. I grabbed my car keys, went out to my car, and gave the ignition a turn...

*click* *click* *click*

Not a terribly wonderful sound. This could mean one of three things:
1) My battery died or was out of juice
2) My electric starter died
3) My alternator died

I was looking around to see if I left any lights on in the car and didn't see anything that would have drained the battery. Nonetheless, I decided to find someone to try and jump my car. I found a couple of guys that lived in my apartment complex to help me out. He pulled his car over to try and start it... nothing.

This was actually good news to some degree because it ruled out that my alternator was dead... unfortunately it ruled out the best-case where something was left on in the car to run down the battery. I started hunting around and found the battery serial number. It was a battery from 1998 which was supposed to last around 6 years... so I had a pretty clear idea as to what was wrong.

It was too late and dark to do anything more that night so I went inside to do some research as to what battery I should be looking for. I actually hadn't ever changed a car battery before and was a bit worried about electric shock (I've been zapped by 12,000 volts before so I'm overly paranoid) so I looked up tips on changing batteries too.

The next day Michelle called to see what I was up to and I told her what was going on. She offered to help out and drive me to get supplies. I picked up a new battery and a set of socket wrenches because I have no tools out here at all.

Because the battery had been there so long, there was some horrible corrosion on one of the terminals. It was almost impossible to fit a socket wrench around and also almost impossible to turn. I stripped it a little in the process also which didn't help. After I got everything changed out the car started perfectly so I set out to get a new terminal bolt and some anti-corrosive spray to clean things up.

I got everything changed out and to make a long story short, I ended up getting to work around 6PM on Saturday and worked till 10. So instead of the 8-12 hours I had hoped, I got stuck with a dead car battery and a ton of errands. Needless to say I'm currently at work taking a bit of a break before I dive back into things.

As a patent examiner, we get Monday off because it's Columbus day and I work a government job (hooray), but it sucks that my "long weekend" is going to consist only of Monday.