But if I were to add to that exceptionally small list, it’d be for car manufacturers and especially their engineering staff who seem hell bent on going out of their way to make mending the simplest of things frustratingly difficult to well-nigh impossible.
I thought I was done with the breathtaking stupidity of having to go through the wheel well to mend a light bulb when my poor Traverse was hauled away for the final time after she’d broken a CV joint and the axle.
Toyota’s engineers surely could not have been so mindlessly ignorant.
Mind you, I’ve only been driving Nick’s Camry for a couple of weeks so I’m still getting used to her quirks.
But it was still a nasty surprise when taking her in for the annual inspection that she was failed for both side-marker lights being out.
In the light of hindsight, I should have just taken the guy up on his offer of $20 per bulb to mend them but having looked under the bonnet and seeing that the main lamps were readily accessible without blindly doing unholy things through the wheel well…I figured I’d decline the price gouging and go find a packet of a couple of bulbs for about $12 total and be done with it.
Over two hours of abject frustration in a hot garage this afternoon later where the bulbs managed to fall off of the stupid connector that I’m trying desperately to wedge into it’s proper receptacle and I’m really questioning my life choices of trying to mend this myself.
You’d think I’d learn but in fairness, the videos looked much less heinous than doing this stupid stuff on the Traverse.
At least with the Traverse, once you managed to magically get the lamp connected to the socket, you were pretty much home free. The last time I did this in May, it literally only took ten minutes from start to finish after many previous sessions through the years that had lasted hours and had voluminous amounts of cursing in many languages.
And yeah, the suggestions of putting duct tape on a screwdriver to try to fish it out from the headlamp was a fantasy at best.
So now I’m looking at the unpleasant alternative of going back to that inspection place and paying the $20 per bulb and hope that he doesn’t spike the price much higher out of spite once he discovers just how lousy a procedure that really is and how much effort it entails.
The other choice is Nicholas knocking off the front bumper and pulling the headlamp assembly to retrieve the poor lost amber bulbs and then it should be easy enough to install the bulbs on both sides without them falling off. But we’ll be doing this in a slightly cooler than hell garage that was very unpleasant during the first attempt at mending the bulbs that truly look like they’ve never been replaced since that car was first sold in 2011-2012… 🙁
He seems to think it’s doable.
Not as easy as it’d be with his lift and power tools but the available time to get them mended and the re-inspection done so that the registration can be renewed without penalty doesn’t really allow for really good choices.
Somehow I’m thinking more than a few curses will be appended to my name in the process, some of which will be deserved.
A few hours after that conversation, we’re on our way back to the house from him substituting as a goalie in a beer league game with the prospect of mending the Camry late into the night after he’d stopped at Cook Out to get something to eat.
The best laid plans, eh?
They had a queue round their Knightdale location two levels deep and I’m really not feeling as gung-ho to see a bumper removed so we decide to bag it for the night and I’ll just lump it and pay up in the morning.
Morning comes round way too early and I’m at the inspection place which was surprisingly empty of cars on a Friday morning when registrations are due.
NC vehicle inspectors have special computers and communications infrastructure to update the DMV’s computers upon a successful inspection but it doesn’t do them a whole lot of good if Rectum has buggered the Internet in the local area.
The gent was nice enough to go ahead and mend the bulbs (and thankfully not charge more than he quoted or curse my name when he remembered how those have to be mended which I can only ascribe to him being exceptionally happy to have something more productive than twiddling his thumbs to do whilst waiting on his network connection to come).
He had them both done in about twenty minutes and then I was off to pick up Alex at the groomer’s where I was expecting Mocha to pop out of the van but was surprised to see Mistletoe instead. I guess reading the calendar entry a bit closer is probably a good idea…
Fortunately, the network connection was back when Alex and I wandered round and we were able to finally complete the inspection so that Caesar could be rendered unto and the tag could be renewed for another year.
Yay. 🙂