| Monday, June 20, 2005 |
23:48 - Car update
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Oh yeah—in case anybody's wondering, the car is still stuck in quarantine. Bob Lewis claims the battery is "bad", and a day's worth of research shows me that Die Hard and Optima and Autolite all make batteries for every VW Jetta model and year—except for mine, the GLS with the VR6 engine. (Naturally. I should expect such things by now.) And Bob Lewis wants to charge me $240 to replace the existing crappy factory battery with another crappy factory battery.
Reportedly there's such a thing as an "International" battery, which Sears tells me is a Die Hard sort of variant for foreign cars, but it's less a brand name than a standard of some kind (apparently any manufacturer can make an "International" battery). I can get one for $99, but not from Sears, as they apparently don't stock them.
Tomorrow I'll find out just how Bob Lewis intends to break down that $240 figure into parts and labor; if they quote me more than about $120 for parts, I'll go over there and get them to give me a jump, and I'll drive to some place where I can get a better battery put in, like the park where I can hire a hobo to do it. Then I'll do what I have to do to figure out whether the weird idle situation and random blinking lights have to do with the bad battery, and what they might owe to having that mysteriously disconnected rear power outlet reconnected. (I'm sure it's just my fevered imagination playing tricks on me, but I could swear—now that I think about it—that I remember a service way back in 1999 or so when the dealer reported weird electrical problems and traced them to the power outlet, which they "solved" by disconnecting it upon my approval, which at the time seemed sensible, since I had no plans to use it).
This time tomorrow I'll either have a working car, or one where the hood doesn't close because I've got an anvil welded in there.
UPDATE: Wait. Maybe it was an Interstate battery.
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Brian Tiemann
