Cars, Horns & Husbands

Readers may have heard me joke about the hubby’s first car a couple times in previous posts here and here. We’ve recently discovered his current car, referred to as the old “bucket o’ bolts” is actually older comparatively than the car he drove in high school. He thinks that’s pretty ridiculous and I must agree.

There are numerous things wrong with this car from the A/C being out to some weird electrical issues. On top of that it smells like “old car”. Well, now this thing has a new problem. It seems there’s something wrong with a connection somewhere which causes the alarm to go off on its own and the horn starts honking. Naturally, we discovered this new “feature” at 3am on a weekday morning, along with several of our neighbors. The first time it happened, hubby stumbled out front in his boxers to turn the thing off thinking it was just a fluke. After settling back into bed, it went off again. Rinse and repeat a couple times and he finally disconnected the battery; a task he now must do each and every time he drives his car.

This reminds me of a similar car issue in my prior marriage. While I’ve never actually shared stories from past including the wasband here, I’ll go ahead and share this one. Flash back to my twenties living in Provo, Utah. We were the typical poor, starving student family and had only one car; a crappy one. I had purchased this thing brand new but made a very poor choice and after only a few years it had more problems than you could imagine. The most memorable was the bizarre electrical problem that made the engine stop. The car would just suddenly stop dead in its tracks. We’d had it looked at by mechanics at length on two separate occasions and they couldn’t figure it out. One day while out driving, we accidentally discovered that if the engine started to cut out on us and we honked the horn it would keep going! So until we finally got it fixed we actually drove around town honking like idiots just to be able to stay moving on the road. Of course, this was Provo, Utah so I can assure you that our odd vehicular behavior was hardly the wackiest thing going on around there. Oh, the memories!

Back to the present day, with the hubby’s car honking issue. We had an appointment yesterday right after he got home from work so I had just gone out front to meet him and get in our other car. I watched him pull up, hop out of his car dressed in his nice work clothes, grab a towel and pop the hood to disconnect his battery. I was chuckling as he came over to get in our car to leave and said; "At this point, with all that’s wrong with that car the only things missing are one of those special stickers in the back window for not being able to pass the Smog Test and some Bondo on the doors!"

And that folks is one of those life lessons about finding the hilarity in everything.