Friday the 13th

Normally, I love Friday the 13th. I'm not a superstitious person, but I enjoy other people's ridiculous superstitiousness. That is so not a word.

It's possible that today may have changed my mind.

This morning, as I was driving to work (in the rain, but not barefoot or uphill or anything), my car made this funny sound. Well, a funnier sound that the funny sound it had been making for about a week. I've found that you can fix most funny sound problems in your car by turning your radio up louder. If you do this, though, you should expect that it will make an even funnier sound soon. Which is where I found myself this morning.

Note: when I say "funny sound," I do not mean funny haha. I mean...bad and costly to repair.

Then the smell of burning rubber seeped in through the floor. Or the vents. Or, well, it was just there. And it would be nothing but trouble.

I made it to work (barely). One of my coworkers is a trained ARMY mechanic, so I asked if he would listen to my car and just see if he knew what might be wrong. He listened.

Some belt thingy broke. I know nothing about cars. He said it was no big deal, and if I bought a new one, he could easily replace it. So we went to the AutoZone and bought a belt. Twelve bucks, no biggie.

I should mention here that it was about 33 degrees outside, rainy and windy. When got back to the office and popped my hood, we realized that the insides of the car would have to be taken apart to change this belt. Literally, we had to detach the motor from the rest of the car. Ugh.

About an hour into it, we looked at the belt and realized that it couldn't be the right belt. It was about a quarter of the size of the old one (which was ripped completely to shreds). So back to the AutoZone we trekked. The new belt was $17, but of course, they didn't have it in stock. We found it at the second we tried, at least.

Five hours later, we're all soaked and freezing (because of course I was wearing my cute copper snakeskin flats with no socks...) and frustrated and tired. We had made about 137 "that's what she said" jokes. You wouldn't believe the opportunities for "that's what she said" while working on a car. Wow.

We finally got the belt on. I started it up and...bam! It started making the funny noise again. Ugh.

After all that, one of the pulleys the belt goes around was broken. So the new belt started shredding almost immediately. I had to take it to the dealership anyway. Five hundred dollars later, the dealership changed the belt (it took me a while to convince them that I had only driven 10 miles on it) and the pulley and the tensioner. I don't know what that is. But all in all it was probably less than $100 worth of parts. I hate the dealership bastards. Fuck 'em.

Happy Friday the 13th. I hope yours was better than mine.