Sooo, where was I? Oh yeah...gonna be late for the Mountaineers game.
I looked up and saw nothing but black. I channeled Derek Smalls in asking "How much more black could it be?" And then, from the heart of the blackness, in a Robert DeNiro monotone: "Plenty. Time to wake up and smell the napalm." I closed my eyes against the sound only to smell oil and lilac from the south of France and it brought me back....back to her. The only woman who had ever spelled my name in quite that tone of voice, quite that accent. Was it better to face the blackness of the present or the opacity of the past? Just then the cat's nose twitched, the mouse sprang, the tulip self-pollinated, and the ashes rose.
But I digress. After realizing that my car was not about to start, I resolved to spend the night in the office (had a bunch of work to catch up on, anyway), and then next morning I'd run out and get a replacement starter. Surely it was the starter and nothing more complicated, right? Right. So, after working 'til about 10 or so, I bedded down in one of the conference rooms that happened to have a recliner in it. It was then that I realized a downside to working for this energy efficiency company: the lights in the building are almost exclusively controlled by motion sensors. Want to read a bit before drifting off? Must move every 5 minutes for the sensor to notice you. Want to go to sleep? Stay perfectly still for 5 minutes until the sensor thinks you're gone, then enjoy the dark. Want to stay asleep? Do not change positions in the least, for if you do, the sensor will register the motion and assume that you want light to work, and provide it for you. Not that electronic sensors really "assume" anything, strictly speaking, but I assume you get the gist.
Morning arrives much earlier than normal (the office must invest more in daylight savings than I do at home), and I start my day by making coffee, showering (Yes, there's a shower in the office. Right next to the new mothers' lactation room, in fact), and scratching. Get online, find a starter in town: $240 (plus $90 core charge). I borrow the boss' car to go pick it up. Get back to the parking lot behind the office (now mercifully drained) to remember that I don't have my usual set of tools with me. Great, so I send out an email to everyone in the office asking if there's someone among them with a socket set I could borrow for an hour or two. Nary a one. Come on, an office of 110+ energy geeks and engineers and not a single ratchet to be found? Well, one, actually: Permanently attached to a 7/16" socket lying on the floor of a forgotten supply closet. Not helping.
I know! The Building Manager! A building this size (half a city block, three stories) must have a supply of tools for maintenance, right? Nope. The wine wholesalers who operate their forklifts all day in the back of the building? You guessed it: Nope. I thought that I could get what I needed at the hardware store down the block, but the idea of buying more tools to supplement the way-too-many that I already have at home nauseated me. Alas, I took some psychological Ipicac and bought a 40-piece basic mechanic's socket set for $40. With my new tools and a couple crescent wrenches that I found under my seat, I set out to work on getting the starter changed (by now it's after 9:00, and I need to be on the road by 1:00 in order to pick Nora up at 3:00 from her house 130 miles down the freeway). Everything goes well, until it comes to the last bolt, that hard-to-reach one on the underside nuzzled up against the transmission. Can't. Quite. Get. The. Socket. Onto. It. The one in front, I could use one of the wrenches, since there's enough room to turn it. Not so in the back. Come to find that the socket wouldn't fit because of the elongated threaded rod on that corner, necessitating an 18mm deep socket. My new set contains shallow sockets from 7mm to 19mm. Deep sockets from 10mm to....well, suffice it to say that it did not include the vaunted 18mm deep socket for which I would've traded my kingdom (shrinking by the day, I know, but still....)
Cussing, I return to my desk to check email. Lo and behold, there's a response from a co-worker, Bob, who'd just returned form a site visit, granting me full access to the "full set of metric sockets" he keeps in his truck. Surely he has the right one. After pulling out his socket set, I had to chuckle. There was a nice space for all the deep sockets, all the way from 8mm to 21mm. Almost every one of those spaces housed a shiny round object, gleaming up at me, begging to be of assistance. Yet....what was that space between 17mm and 19mm? Exactly that: a space, glaring up at me as if to say "What? It ain't MY fault you were stupid enough to drive that low-slung car with the cold air intake barely above the bumper through a flooded parking lot." Bob stares back incredulous, embarrassed. The he remembers the lawn-mower repairs he'd done the weekend prior, apologizes. I smile back through gritted teeth and assure him that it's OK, really, and begin walking back to the hardware store. Nope, no individual sockets for sale, but they'd be happy to sell me the advanced 210-piece mechanics' set for the low, low price of $160. Ummm, no. I'll check with Hulbert Supply a couple blocks away. Hulbert's happens to be out of stock (uh-huh) but is expecting a delivery in the next week or so. They suggest I check at Home Depot in Williston. Kinda like suggesting the Pope replenish his supply of Eucharist wafers from the local Matzos-R-Us.
I grit my teeth all the way back to my car (vaguely aware that I may be incurring far more than $160 in dental bills in so doing). Crawl back under it with the blind determination and bullheadedness upon which this country was founded, and discovered that I could get a 3/4" shallow socket onto the nut, if I leave it just that much askew. Then, if I insert the 6" extension about halfway into its seat, the ratchet onto that, and, twist it at just. the. right. angle., I just might be able to muster just enough torque to break it free from the 10 years of grime and road salt holding it fast. To my amazement, it actually worked. However, for every turn, the extension slipped out of the socket (since it couldn't be fully seated properly). Went like this: 1) set socket at exact angle 2) gingerly insert extension halfway into socket--while painstakingly maintaining socket's angle on nut 3) attach ratchet onto end of extension 4) turn ratchet until extension slips out of socket and/or socket slips off nut. 1/6 of a rotation done. Repeat steps 1-4 for the 10 full rotations until the nut was close enough to the end of the bolt that I could get the shallow 18mm socket onto it and use the tools as they were designed.
I cheered and grunted (chunted?) as I lifted the old starter clear of the engine. Felt like that clansman showing fellow Cave-Bear Daryl Hannah this funky hot weird gas-liquid smoky thing called "grunt" that had burned his almost opposable thumb. But alas, no Daryl to be seen (least of all in them animal furs.....) One opposable thumb sacrificed to the table-saw gods 7 years hence, the other sore and covered in grease. And a mere hour before I had to be on my way to see the wee one.
Installing the rebuilt starter was less eventful, since I knew what needed to be done ahead of time in order to get the nuts and bolts where they should be. Made a mental note, however, to re-tighten that silly back-bottom nut once I was within striking distance of my own belovedly complete socket set. I took the car off the pile of 2X4s I'd been using as jack stands and sat behind the wheel. Steering wheel. Turned the key, and (OMG-OMG-OMG) the starter engaged and the engine went "clunk." Still not "vroom", but "clunk" was better to my overwrought, sleep-deprived, stressed little brain than was the horrible screech I'd been graced with the day before, right? I cried. Just a bit, but there it was. I'd been defeated by the couple ounces of water that had managed to breach my car's air-intake defenses and insinuate themselves, like a virus, into my engine's most sensitive and intimate secret places. The dreaded H2O1 strain of the German Beetle flu. I didn't come to realize the full magnitude of the world-class ass-whooping I'd received until weeks later.
I called Enterprise Rent-a-Car ("They'll Pick Me Up", I intoned to myself) with whom my employer has an account. They did in fact pick me up (and boy could I use a pick-me-up by that point!), and as it turns out, I was only about 10 minutes getting on the freeway in my rented sleek black Ford Focus with NY plates.
This seems like another good place to insert a chapter break. More fun and adventure to come...stay tuned!!