The Delimma of the Lumina

Hey, that some what rhymed. I'm so talented.

Okay, Friday the 13th came to me TODAY! So, y'all know my car is POSSESSED, right? Well, today we were gonna take it up to Walmart (my Grandfather's idea) to get a new battery for it. My dad thought it was the battery. We went outside Thursday afternoon when he got home and looked at it. It cranked up fine and he really didn't see anything wrong with it. So, his assumption was the battery was about to go dead. Now, the car cranked in the presence of my mother and father now. I'm thinking that the car just doesn't like me. But the story goes further. But that's not where the story starts. The story starts yesterday. Here's how it went down.

After my car trouble this past Thursday, my dad informed me we would get it fixed Saturday. Since I don't have class until Monday, that seemed like the perfect plan. He instructed me to clean out my car for the day when we go get it fixed because he'd be driving it. So, Friday the 13th and I gotta clean out my car. Before I started that, I got a serious craving for a coke. So, I got in the car, literally prayed so it would crank, and drove it to the store. I left it running as I went inside Bridges to get a coke. Once I got my coke, I drove it home.

I left it alone for a couple of hours and went inside to do other things. I was keeping tabs on the weather channel also because, as Barbie predicted, we were suppose to get some pretty hefty stuff for Saturday and Friday night. So, at around 2 or so that afternoon, I decide I'll clean out my car. My thought was to pull it into the garage since both my parents were at work. So, here I go to my car to crank it. I sat down with the door open and stuck the key in. The dings were perfect. They weren't deformed so, I thought, "Yeah, the car's gonna crank." Wrong. I turn the key, nothing happened. Hmm, okay, let's try this again. I turned the key again. Still, nothing. Alright, third times a charm, right? WRONG. Turned it AGAIN, wouldn't even turn over. Well, great. So, I pulled the garbage can to my car and cleaned out my car from where it sat in the hot sun of my drive way. But I did get it done.

So, this morning, I woke up to the sound of rain. We had like two claps of thunder. That's it though. It rained for like an hour. So, I got up and got ready for my drum lesson that morning and my dad and I drove out to Lakeland Music and met up with Paul, my drum teacher. I did my lesson and then we drove to Pit Stop in Florence to get my dad's oil changed. Turns out he needs new tires (he drives more miles in a week then I do in three months) because he had worn his down so much they were smooth. Which is bad. But he decided he'd wait and take it to Davis Tire and Auto when he got a good expense check. Well, turns out he also needed his transmission fluid changed. He had never gotten it changed. He has over 150,000 miles on it. (It's not an old car either. It's a 2001 model. He just travels a lot. He's beaten the mileage on my car and it's ten years old. It's a 97 model.) So, they changed that. It took about an hour or so. Now, I left my house at 9:45, had a drum lesson at 10:30 (which was more like 10:45 because Paul was late gettin there), then came to Pit Stop for my dad's stuff. By the time we got home to pick up my car to take it up to Walmart, it was about 1. So, we get my car, it cranks, thank God, and we drive it up to Walmart. The lady comes out and meets us and my dad told her to hook up the diagnostic machine thingy to my car. As we thought, the battery was on its way to being dead. Wasn't quite there but gettin there. So, my dad said, go ahead and change the battery.

Now, we think this is a fifteen minute job because my dad can do it in fifteen minutes. Wrong. We go into Walmart and look around for a little while. We come back to the auto area with a few items. This is about an hour later (around 2:30). I see my car just inside the auto area with the hood popped. It looked like they were almost done. Again, wrong. About 3 or so, my dad walked out to see what was the hold up. He came back in about five minutes later looking mad. I asked him what was going on and he informed me that they hadn't even taken my old battery out. My exact response was "What?!"

So, to make an already long story short, we didn't get out of there until like 3:45. We dropped off the car at 1:45. It took those dumb people two hours to fix a very simple problem. But it is fixed and driveable. Strange. But I'm home. FINALLY.