Occasionally we all need to recharge our proverbial batteries. As the husband of the mermaid, you probably think I have access to a continual font of battery renewal, and you wouldn’t be wrong about that. But I am talking now about a more mundane battery, the kind you find in a car, or at least you used to find easily in a car. You see, this summer, as I was doing the Rockaway Shuffle, otherwise known as shifting cars in the driveway, I somehow left the mini-mermaid’s car in neutral, and apparently that is cause to drain the battery. Who knew?
I say, who knew? for several reasons. First, the mini-mermaid’s car once was my car, so I should know when the car is in neutral and not in park. That knowledge eluded me for that moment. So, the car was turned off in neutral which one would think would not cause the battery to drain. But cars being what they are today, mainly computers with wheels, that is no longer the case, the battery drained completely.
Now, being the good father that I am, and upon realizing that I made this mistake, I owned it instantly and called AAA, because when you pay for the gold standard, nothing less will suffice. As luck would have it, AAA was able to arrive within the half hour and hopefully able to bail me out of this embarrassment. The spanking new flatbed AAA truck arrived, and the operator quickly understood the problem, that the car was in the driveway dead as doornail (as one might say a century ago, what does that even mean!!!). The AAA operator then brought out a pair of cables, somewhat on the shorter side, and a battery box. Not knowing what this was, he informed me it was a portable way to recharge car batteries.
He popped the hood and then began the search for the battery. Nowhere to be found, we searched the guidebook in the glove compartment, and it said to put the positive and negative cables at certain points on the engine block. The meter confirmed what we already knew, that the battery (wherever it was) was indeed dead. Apparently, you need a voltage charge of about 12% to get a car going, we were under 4%. We attempted to start the car, and nothing happened other than draining the battery box. After recharging the battery box, we thought it might be better to charge the battery directly, and after reading the manual, we finally realized the battery was under the passenger seat. Why the car manufacturer would put the battery under the car seat was beyond us, but I think it had something to do with making room for the important component to go under the hood: the computer. We tried to charge the battery and had no luck again.
Then we realized that this car had two batteries. Apparently one for the car and one for the computer, I think. So, we tried to recharge them both and again failed. The battery box just was not powerful enough. Well, I thought that AAA would simply connect the battery to the flatbed truck and rev the engine like the old days. But AAA did not have long cables, because why would they ever need long cables?
After AAA left, we called my daughter’s father-in-law, who not only still had long cables, but who was instantly able to back his car flawlessly into the driveway alongside the battery dead car. And like the old days, once connected and revved up, started the dead car in a flash.
So, if you ever need to recharge your battery, always have long cables, always know where to place the positive and negative cables, always know what sequence to put them on, try and find the battery, and always have my daughter’s father-in-law number handy, just in case!
