Another Kick in the Ball Joint

I joked recently about my car breaking.  You see, if my car somehow senses that I have a few disposable dollars, it will break, eating up every last disposable dollar.  Sometimes my wife’s car gets jealous when this happens so it breaks, costing even more.

My wife will tell me that I should never joke about this.  In this single instance, she was right.

I figured I was safe, what with having spent my entire disposable income for the month ($5) last weekend at Guitar Center.

We got some snow here in gloom-filled old Pennsylvania, on two Wednesdays in a row.  It was just annoying enough to cause grief during drive times but not enough to get off work.  As anyone who has ever driven a land yacht with rear wheel drive knows, driving on snow is an adventure.  In my car, driving on water is an adventure.  I took a few interesting turns in the snow, in that the car sometimes tended to keep turning for a bit after I had intended it to stop turning.

Within a day or two, I started to hear this really weird squeaking.  It was loud but not ominous, as if I had a really loud mouse riding around inside a tire or something.  It was intermittent (the noise – I”m not sure about the mouse).  It was a sound I had heard before, which I diagnosed as a rear brake misadjustment.  No problem, I’d take it in.

Next night I drive some highway miles and don’t hear a peep.  The following day I drive to work, this being Monday.  Monay is usually but the first Monday in the week and this was no exception.  The noise popped in and out.  No more or less.

All of the sudden I feel a grinding and quickly pull the car into a parking space.  I back up a little, at which point the car seems to want to back up a lot.  This became one of those unsettling moments, like when the car you’re driving decides it wants to go sideways.  You say to yourself, “Gee, a car really shouldn’t go this way.”

I would have said that to myself but I didn’t have enough time, what with the raw panic because the car didn’t seem to want to stop backing up, moving it uncomfortably close to the car in back of it.

Finally the car stopped moving, thankfully.  It also refused to move forward much.  At this point I felt it wise to give up entirely, bright light that I am.

It turned out that stopping entirely was a very good move, at least by the position of my front tire.  It was at a bit of an angle.  The specific angle can’t be quantified but suffice it to say that it took on the sickly appearance of a clown car (except clown cars run).  It was a depressing little angle, in fact.  It seemed to mock me, repeating the phrase “You need a new tie rod – nyah nyah!!” over and over.  It was not an angle conducive to rolling.

Oh, great.  This car has been so good to me.. oh well, we have Triple A so I guess we’ll make use of it.  I phoned the wife.  I felt really bad phoning the wife, as she doesn’t sleep well (or at all) and was really tired.  In fact, she was so tired that there was no answer.  The irony was so deep I had to actually sit there for a while to contemplate the enormity of it.

You see, I am plagued by my wife’s cell phone.  It has become a sort of disease (much like Microsoft Windows).  Apparently it sits dormant all night then continues to sit silently all day, until I get home.  I have no earthly idea what happens when I cross the threshold of my front door but whatever it is, it sets the phone off mightily and repeatedly.

I walk in, sit down, and immediately the cell phone starts to either ring or more likely make dinging noises, signaling a text message.  My wife looks at me with the most innocent face she can muster and says that the phone hasn’t gone off all day (yeah, I know, until I came home).

The blasted communication device will continue to go off all night until it gets too late or until I make enough open threats about grinding it into a fine black powder that in no way resembles the phone that it once was.  Sometimes it’s so bad that even my wife gets sick of hearing it.  Although I’m not so sure…

The reason I’m not entirely certain of my wife’s veracity is the wind chimes.  My wife has her own style.  This is a phrase that polite society uses to indicate someone is eccentric or just plain weird.  It was always used to describe my behavior (“He has his own way of doing things”) but now it explains why my wife puts up wind chimes in the house.  When I say wind chimes, I mean four sets of them.  This is very similar to her collection of mobiles that hang from the ceiling.

Recently wind chimes have started to appear outside.  We try to be courteous neighbors so after the racket started, my wife asked the neighbors if the noise was too much for them.  They either indicated they hadn’t heard them or simply stared and said “WHAT?“

One night while I’m trying to relax but instead trying not to kill my wife’s cell phone because it’s ringing away like mad, I made a discovery…. the text messaging noise is two tones.  The loudest outdoor wind chime makes a noise roughly the same pitch as the first cell phone tone. Because of this, I keep thinking the phone is making noise… I’m constantly waiting for the other tone to drop, as it were.

I think she’s trying to drive me crazy (too late) or to suicide (I’m worth more alive than dead and this is on purpose).

So as I’m sitting there in my car with one sickly canted tire, staring to get cold, I am soaking up the irony that when I call my wife, she can’t hear the phone.  It is positively breathtaking in its supreme stupidy, as if the entire universe sucked in its breath and laughed at me at the same time.

Fortunately we had a houseguest who always keeps her phone close and always answers.  This should be a lesson to my wife, as our guest is hearing-impaired.  She probably had to break down the door to get my wife’s attention but in short order the wife was on her way to rescue me and get me to work.   Notice that rescuing does not necessarily include getting to work.

The place I take my car for repairs in well run, clean, and most importantly, fair and honest.  They had no problem when I told them the car was on its way (not under its own power, of course).  The only problem getting the car there was the way the tow truck driver relentlessly hit on my wife.  He was very disappointed when she didn’t want to ride `up in the truck’ with him.   She was relieved to escape.

In true fashion, the mechanic called back by the end of the afternoon.  In what can only be referred to as a spectacular automobile foulup, my car seemed to think I had eight hundred dollars in spare cash hanging about.  You’ve read the papers; none of us has any spare change.

The only thing I can think of that would explain this would be that either my car overheard my wife talking about a potential tax refund or it has achieved clairvoyance.  The car is done now… all it requires is about eight hundred dollars to pick it up.  The mechanic’s effort at sympathy (he either really needs to work on it or he’s just pretending for fun) was to tell me at least it wasn’t as much as a new car.

In case you’re curious, the ball joint went, taking out everything in a two foot radius.  The mechanic made a point of telling me that all he could find was shards of metal.  (hmmm… I wonder if someone attacked my ball joint with a hand grenade..)

I’m so pissed off that my head is humming.   And even that is doing nothing to drown out my wife’s cell phone, which has realized I’m home for the night and started its evil cacophony.