so. last wednesday, had day off to go watch the sox. ran errands in the morning, down to hyde park, zipped over to the near west side, all vroom vroom in the niquimobile. parked the car at the very end of the block when i got home (street cleaning day; it was all that was available), went off to go shiver at the ballpark while the sox lost. got home, noticed parking spot available right in front of my house and decided to move the car.

which is about when niqui’s car battery decided it was too old for this cold weather shit, rolled over, and died.

now, that was not a crisis. it was annoying, yeah, but a dead battery — meh. it wasn’t even dead-dead, it still powered accessories, there just wasn’t enough juice to start the engine. (although i have to say, it was a really pathetic honk when i locked it up.) i was in a legal parking spot not in danger of further street cleaning restrictions, etc. so i didn’t worry about it too much. i figured, this week i’d call my emergency roadside assistance, get a jump, take it to the shop, get a new battery. which i did this morning. (why not just replace the battery myself? well, friends, volkswagen are very neat people and everything under my hood is very cleverly organized, including the battery compartment which is locked away in a tidy little compartment between two firewalls and under a well-bolted coverplate stretching the entire width of the hood. in short, it would have been a pain, and also, i don’t have any metric sockets.)

rather than taking it to ${dealer_mechanic_located_at_the_far_east_end_of_nowhere}, which is probably 60 minutes away in good traffic, i found a new local shop that had good reviews on the Car Talk site and is literally five blocks away, and they were friendly on the phone, so i drove over there and took my baby in for some new go-juice. and i thought, well, you know. i’m going on this road trip next week, and my brakes are making a funny noise that i can’t quite figure out what it is but maybe there’s a rock stuck in a pad or something, it’s bugging me, and i’m getting a good vibe from the shop and the guys there (plus they have several restored classics in the shop to be worked on, so i’m guessing other folks get a good vibe too), so i’ll ask them to check my brake pads and rotors. and they say they’ll throw in a free rotation for me, and then they say they’ll throw in checking my pollen filter (which is apparently in the same “clever” compartment as the battery and therefore nobody ever bothers to check it) too so long as they’re messing around in there. (i love these guys already, and that’s even before i spot the Jake and Elwood statues by the windows to North Avenue.) they drop me off at the el, i go to work, i drink more coffee (!!!!COFFEE!!!!), i go to a meeting, i come back, … and that is when the shop calls and the guy sort of hesitantly/kindly asks me, “did you have to change a tire recently?”

i say, oh, no, but i did just have all four tires replaced last fall. and he goes, oh, well, do your wheels have a lock key? to which i respond (proudly, having just sorted out a mess in my trunk and putting things away in the little cabinet-thingies where they belong), yeah, pop the trunk, the kit’s in the little compartment on the left-hand side… and he goes, yeah, um, it’s not in the kit.

well. shit.

they’re not a VW dealership, they’re an independent shop, so of course they don’t have my wack-ass proprietary wheel lock key. WHICH I HAVE EVIDENTLY BEEN DRIVING AROUND WITHOUT SINCE SEPTEMBER, AND THANK GOD I NEVER HAD A FLAT BECAUSE BOY WOULD THAT HAVE SUCKED BEYOND THE TELLING OF IT. (i’m a little hot about this.) so i call the dealer parts shop to talk to them. you remember them, the dealer i didn’t want to drive to because it was going to be like two hours in traffic round trip? yeah. they check my vin and, of course, my model of car could have had different sets of wheels, no way to see from just the vin, blah blah, i have to bring it in so they can try it out with various keys and figure out which one i need.

so i tell the nortown guys to (like we have a choice) skip the brakes and rotation then, ha ha!, and they say they’ll keep poking around and see if they can find it, but i’m not really hopeful. because, like i said, i just sorted the trunk out a little bit ago and i probably would have noticed unless it was really wedged somewhere, and, more importantly, the guys at the tire store were… well, let’s just say that unlike the new guys, i did not get a good vibe from them. and that was before they took five hours to change my tires. guys, i have been taking auto shop class for like 12 weeks now, i am the very rankest of amateurs, and i could change and balance my own goddamn tires in an hour, and that includes struggling with the prybar for like 5 attempts to mount the first new tire’s outer lip on the rim because i forgot to soap the bead (“WHY WON’T IT GO ON!?!?!?!….oh.”) and having to go look up the torque specs for the lug nuts in the shop manuals. and they were not that backed up with customers when i went in there. i’m pretty sure the wait was revenge because i had crap in my trunk that the guy had to move to get the wheel kit. (i offered to move it myself — not least because one of the items in there was a ~85 pound APC SmartUPS 1600 with dead batteries, and i would feel guilty inflicting that on anyone — but he was all, no, no, don’t worry about it.) and now my wheel lock key is gone too? lucas tire is not a friend to niqui!

so now i wind up having to drive out to the damn dealer mechanic at the ass end of nowheresville anyways so i can get a new wheel lock key, which may or may not be a stock item so they might have to order it in which case i get to go out there a second time. the only bright side to this is, i had lost one of my keys a while ago (these are the wacky keys that have a tiny radio transmitter that authorizes the ignition to start the engine, i cannot just go get a new one made — and people ask why i like old cars. honestly.), so i can order a new one at the same time. so i guess that’s a good thing. it sucks only having one real key and one valet key, if only because i’m paranoid i might lose the second real key too. and i have no idea how much a new wheel lock key is going to be, and did i mention i had kinda wanted to have my brakes checked before i drove 750 miles next week?

this is pretty much how i feel about this situation:

i just seriously wanna say: this is way more drama than i was prepared to deal with on two and a half hours’ sleep, dude. *headdesk*