Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain!
— Arthur Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
i need to buy the shop manual for my car. i never got around to buying it. i know, i know. and now my front driver’s side window regulator is … sort of doing its own thing. it mostly goes down when i tell it to, and it mostly goes up when i tell it, but sometimes it takes multiple repetitions of the instruction, and sometimes it changes its mind mid-movement and either stops or, more frequently, outright changes direction. it’s been happening more and more frequently. i tried to have the mechanic look at it a couple of weeks ago when i took it in for a tune-up, but the twits scheduled me too late in the day — which is a story for the next paragraph — and they never got to it.
so, i had scheduled the maintenance for a friday, and since it’s way out in suburbia and i was going to have to sit there the entire time (no car loaners, and even if i’d gotten one i’d have taken two of the four hours of the maintenance just driving back and forth from the dealership), i asked for an afternoon appointment. noon, 12PM, for what they estimated to be a four-hour service. okay, fine. until i showed up at 11:45, and i was infomed that the service guys were at lunch from 12 to 1, and they weren’t sure they’d be able to complete my scheduled service before 5 when they go home (the service department is “open” until 7, which is a cruel and infuriating lie — i’m sure they mean that you can pick up your car until 7, but bog help you if you want any work done after 5), much less look into my two other issues, the window and the squeak in my rear left suspension. you mean i showed up at noon so that i could sit on my ass for an hour while your mechanics are at lunch, and you’re not even sure you can “get to me” before they go home because the appointment was so late in the day? you go to hell — you go to hell and you die, mike haggerty volkswagen! so i sat down as they finished playing Jaws and then played it again on the DVD player (i don’t even like Jaws), listened to my Eragon audiobook while i knit. i had brought my laptop and DVDs of my own to watch, but i’d forgotten the damned power adapter so i couldn’t plug in, and using the DVD would run the battery down too quickly, and they refused to play my DVDs despite me being the only person in the waiting room because apparently the dealership owner is “very picky” and quantum leap (“is this PG?” quantum leap? are you shitting me? it’s just about as freaking G-rated as a prime-time tv show in 1989 could be! all it needed to be more child-friendly was a talking animal!) isn’t pre-approved for waiting room non-offensiveness (but we can shred beachgoers, that’s all right). so i sat, and i knitted, and i listened, and i occasionally muttered “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” sarcastically to myself in my head. anyways, they finally came and got me — turns out, i magically did make the deadline before the guys went home, which is a good thing because i was prepared to be pissed if i’d taken a day off work to go sit in a dealership waiting room while they didn’t even fix my car because their scheduling people are morons, but they only got to look at the mysterious squeak (they replaced my rear brakes and cut the rotors down, which they thought was the cause of the squeak, but it turns out, not so much — they said they checked and it was okay, but i still think it’s the suspension), not look at my wack-ass window regulator. so, fuck it, i’m going to buy the manual and see about fixing it my own damn self. i’m not afraid of no steenkin’ power regulator which is probably a module that snaps into the electrical system somewhere. i have my own metric wrenches and i am not afraid to use them.
