Where the Fuck is the Battery?
I had to be in Austin early this morning and the car would not start. The dash lights lit up, but the dome lights were very dim. I got the battery charger and popped the hood, only to be confused. There was no battery insight, nor was there a positive or negative hub to hook the cables to. I thought I just need to slowly evaluate the situation, which was a success, kind of. I found a plastic red cover with a positive (+) mark on it. Sweet. That must be the battery. I popped the plastic cover off to find a thousand fuses and mini fuse boxes. WTF. That is not a battery. Upon further inspection, I saw no place for the negative cable. FUCK. I had to get the owners manual out, which is a 500 pages of information, just in case you are a dumb fuck who has no common sense. After five minutes of flipping pages, I found the one page regarding the battery. Just one page. It didn’t actually give me the location of the battery, but instructed me on how to get a jump. The positive nub, I had no problem with. It was locating the negative that I had trouble with. Of course, there was NO diagram, of this because that would make sense. Instead, they suggest I hook the black cable to the screw shaft to the right of the positive connection. Okay, well, there are two fucking screws sticking up. Is this supposed to help with fuel efficiency? I wonder because there is no reason they now hide the mother fucking battery and make it so hard that even common sense cannot assist you if you need to fucking get a jump. So, I read, out loud, the instructions and I deduced which screw to zap. It would not take a jump, so then I had to figure out where the battery is. Turns out, it is not where the positive and negative nubs are… NOPE, again, that would make sense. At that point, I waited for Devil to get out of the shower because I wasn’t sure which plastic cover to look under and I was beyond the point of being annoyed. After 20 minutes of him trying to get the battery out of the front grill, he was pissed. Mission accomplished. lol. Off to the Auto Zone to get a new battery, just to find it wasn’t the problem. It is most likely the starter, but that is for another day.
What annoys me about new and “improved” machines is that they may be some kind of “efficient” but they don’t last as long as they used to and now it requires a manual just to find the car battery. That is ridiculous. I never thought I should even look under the hood to make sure I know where things are. I have always checked/added oil, when needed, maintained power steering fluid and all the other stuff… now, I am not sure I could even check the dip stick. I might need to take a course on this subject and soon.