I think the Bus is going this weekend.
The past month and a bit has been hilariously hectic - which is why I've pretty much been an internet-no-show for the past 6 weeks or so (when was my last post? when I shaved my head? yeah.. figured as much)
I've got so much to tell, but I only want to talk about my car at the moment. You all know about my car. You all know how much I luuuuuuuuuuuuuurve my car ♥♥♥ and you all know how sad I'm going to be (is it really possible to die of laughter? coz I'm thinking that I might..) when theshitbox i mean..uh..when the Bus and I finally go our seperate ways.
Ahh where do I start? In the middle? Nah.. might as well start at the beginning..
The carpark at my work is a death trap. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but every time you turn a corner when you're leaving or entering that place, you're guaranteed to almost come to a head on collision. I've managed to avoid one, til recently. See, what happens is you get all the way to the boom gate out of the garage and breathe a sigh of relief coz you've managed to not hit the benzes and the beemers and the alfas and what not with your shitbox Camry wagon, you drive out of the gate and then BOOM a 2 week old mazda 3 drives into your front end.
Ahhhhhhhhhh shit. Okay so it's not my fault, but because I don't have insurance on the bus, and because AAMI are an asshole of an insurance company, they're now trying to screw me sideways. The first thing they said to me was "After an investigation, we've concluded that you're at fault.."
Investigation?
WHAT FUCKING INVESTIGATION?
No serious - wouldn't an investigation include um.. i dunno.. asking ME what fucking happened?
Apparently not.
So yeah, that's been fun - it's still unresolved, and my car still has (apparently) $2500 worth of damage.. which basically means, my car is a repairable write off if they decide that I'm not actually at fault, which I'm not, but I'm sure that they're going to fuck me sideways until they're absolutely certain that I'm actually telling the truth.
I mean, seriously, as IF I'd drive my piece of shit into a 2 week old mazda 3.
So there was that.. and then..
Three days later, I'm sitting at the lights waiting for them to go green (mind you, I was in a shit mood coz it was hot and mum dragged me to see the wiggles - which was okay coz they sang quack quack cockadoodle .. don't ask.. but yeah anyway..) when all of a sudden, my VERY STATIONARY car moved forward about 2 feet. The worst thing about this was that there was a very very expensive Jag infront of me. Yeah.. holy fuck I'm glad that the light turned green when the car behind me (a 1982 ford laser mind you..) hit the back end of my car.
Luckily, there was no damage to my car, but the poor bugger who hit my car, his front end got demolished. Dunno how that happens, but yeah.. I felt so bad for him, especially considering the first thing he said when he got out of the car was "oh.. my fucking.. OMG.. my mum's gonna KILL ME!!" I kind of chuckled at that, even tho I know the situation is nowhere near funny, but hey, his car is the borked one, not mine (oh wait.. yeah it is, just not in the corner he hit).. He followed it up with "oh shit.. man I'm sorry.. and you have a kid in the car, are you both ok?"
Now, before that point I'd decided it wasn't worth going thru the whole insurance thing with this guy - there's jack shit wrong with where he hit my car, and his front end is messed up bad.. but after he said that? I told him "look, just tell your mum you were parked at the shopping centre.. it's christmas.. and say that's how you found the car.."
This guy was so happy that he hugged me three times and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
That's gratitude for you :D
So yeah, that was a kind of sad story with a happy ending.. but then..
Each year, Jay, B and I go driving around to look at christmas lights. It's a tradition. We go to dinner. We order the same sort of meal every year, we drive around til it's dark looking for adventures, then we go to the christmas tree light farm.. then we drive around some more looking at everyone's homes and enjoying the light displays.
This year, it all got screwed up. It rained. and rained. and rained and rained AND RAINED SOME MORE! There was an absolute downpour and roads were flooding.. it was insane.
So like.. what's the first thing you expect me to do in a situation like that?
Drive around of course.
So we drive around looking for adventures, B falls asleep in the back (that's how shit it was) and then I go to the shop to do my paperwork. On the way to the shop, we drove up and down this road with a HUGE dip in it that every time you went down you felt like you were on a roller coaster and ended up with your stomach hanging around somewhere near your tonsils.. and then as you drive back up - your stomach ends up near your toes. Of course, this only really works at 60kms/h or more.. so yeah... you can imagine how fast I was going. It's not a great idea though, coz the first thing you want to do as you're going down the dip is close your eyes and cover your face with your hands - it takes a lot of guts i mean.. stupidity.. to do what we did with our eyes open. That, my friends, was the highlight for the night until..
I finish up my paperwork and then it's time for me and Jay to go home. Half way home, WOOSH we drive thru a huge ass puddle and me being me.. and jay being jay.. we get excited and decide we should go looking for more fun puddles to drive thru. At that same moment, a cop car drives past, lights flashing - and for about 4 seconds we consider following it.. then I remember that my headlight is broken (it still works, it's just smashed up) and that maybe following police cars at midnight with a car that could um.. possibly.. be unroadworthy.. would be a bad idea.
Isn't it just our luck that the next thing that passes us is a fire engine?
So what did we do? We're at the street we need to turn into to head to my place.. and what did we do? What do you think we did? We followed the fire engine didn't we? Yeah, it wasn't a good idea... we know this now. At that time though (midnight to be exact), it seemed to be a fantastic idea. Mr Fireman is driving his firetruck and turns a corner, we go to follow and get a red arrow.
Goddamnit we can't follow him anymore. Poop.
So we drive straight, and hit another puddle.. WOOHOO! Puddles yay! I figure (in the tiny little brain of mine) that maybe if we turned right, we could somehow cut the fire engine off and meet it up at the next intersection..
I wasn't counting on the road being flooded was I?
So - we're off looking for puddles.. and fire engines.. and then, a puddle finds us. Seriously this thing was all the way across the road, four cars long and about half a wheel deep. It didn't even look like there was a puddle (river?) on the road, it just looked like the road was wet.. which it was.. but we didn't realise it was THAT wet! The first thing we did when we hit the puddle was shit a brick. At least I had enough common sense not to brake, which is what I wanted to do.. I slowed down (water was pouring all over the car from the rain and from the puddle) and we make it all the way thru without any hassle, we both look at eachother and breathe a big sigh of relief.
Then..
the electricals all start to die.
Lights start flickering.. engine starts straining.. stuff starts going weird..
3 metres out of the puddle.. and the car dies.
You know how people have "famous last words"? My famous last words at that moment were "oops"
Jay pointed out that it was a bit of an understatement.. she wasn't far wrong. We sat in the car, in the rain, for half an hour trying to get it started.. we then figured it was time to call the RACV.. you know what I hear? "there is an approximate 10 minute wait before we can attend your call.. and approximately a 3 hour wait before we can service you" or something like that. Just. Fucking. Great.
We sit in the car, and debate.. I choose, at that moment, to point out to Jay that we were looking for an adventure.. she chose (rightly so) to point out that I'm an idiot (even though she didn't use those exact words..) and we continued brainstorming.
Suggestion 1: Ring my brother the mechanic?
Answer: No.
Reason: He'll kill me for waking him up. He'll kill me for waking up his pregnant wife. He'll just kill me.
Suggestion 2: Ring my dad
Answer: No
Reason: I'll never hear the end of it. He'll kill me also. And I'll never live it down.
Suggestion 3: Ring the RACV back
Answer: Tried
Outcome: Hung up - same as above. Grrr!
Suggestion 4: Ring Jay's mum
Answer: No
Reason: She lives 1/2 an hour away..
Reconsideration: Better than getting killed by my parents/brother.
So we call JayMum. She's not impressed to say the least, but she's a good JayMum and she comes out to rescue her daughter, and her daughter's idiot best friend. She eventually gets there and we try to jump the car.
Not gonna happen.
We try and try and try and each time.. nothing happens.. then, a gift from the gods alights from the train passing by (he actually got off the train coz he thought the bottleshop was open at midnight right? yeah in st. albans.. what a goose..) and comes across to help us.
You know what the best words to hear are when you're broken down on the side of the road in the rain? "what's up ladies? I'm a mechanic.."
He tried absolutely everything to get my car going for about 2 hours. He eventually had to concede defeat and said "I can't get the distributor cap off.. and I bet that's what it is.."
So we go home. Leave my car on the nature strip (sorry Jay, I know you said you weren't gonna push my car hahaha oh you got jibbed lol) and go home.
The next morning I go back to my car, call the RACV and he's there within 10 minutes. You know you have a shit car when the first words out of the mechanics mouth are "Hi Tan, nice to see you again.. what's wrong this time?" (he was out to jump my car earlier that week).. I explained what happened, and he laughed. He took the distributor cap off and lo and behold.. 2 cups of water fall out.
It's kind of hard to make your car work when it's DROWNING.
You know how he fixed it? Wiped the inside down with a towel, sprayed some WD40 inside it and screwed the cap back on.
Viola! Car go workie yay!
Ahh.. you think that's the end do you? Well.. it's not..
The car's okay for a week or three .. I thought that maybe the wash the engine got was doing the car good.. but yah, a couple of weeks and it's time to have the car jumped again. Instead of ringing My RACV guy, I ring my friend Caz.. I know she's on her way to the shop that I'm managing (hahah I pretend I'm boss and no one listens anyway) so I call her and say "come past my place, jumpstart my car please?" and she does so. She's a good friend like that.
The bus is not happy. It doesn't want to go. It doesn't want to start. I kicked it and said "start you fucking stupid thing or I'm gonna take a sledgehammer to you".. and it still didn't start..
Eventually, I just let the battery charge off her car while hers was running.. lo and behold.. the bus starts.
Now.. I know that I should turn off the car I jumped mine off, but we were in a rush to get to the shop and open up, so I grabbed the leads and took them both off my battery, black first, red next.. as I was grabbing the black lead tho, my fingers went inbetween the clamps and I felt a very strong tingle running up my arm.
I fucking electrocuted (okay, overexaggeration) myself. 12 volts of power shot thru me. It was over with in a second or two, and I was okay.. til my arm started to tingle.. and my hand went all numb.. and then I had no feeling whatsoever in my arm and I'm getting weird heart palpitations.
I head off to the doctor's and after the usual pleasantries he says "So what've you done to yourself this time Tanja?" I explain what happened.. and he sits there and smirks at me and says "well.. Tanja.. you're a bright spark aren't you?"
Oh the fucking hilarity.
He gave me the day off, so I let my bosses know I wasn't going to be in. One of them sends an sms back - "I guess you're gonna be charged and ready to go tomorrow?" oh ha ha..
follow it with comments such as "Ohm-i-god" and "that's shocking" and "amp-parrently cars arent meant to jump start people" from various family (*glares at my dad*) I'm surrounded by fucking comedians.
I hope they keep their day jobs and don't CHARGE people for listening to their jokes.. *boom tish*
And so that's that.. or is it? There's still two days before I go to check this new car out
who knows what'll happen between now and saturday morning.
Anyway, I'm off to bed. Hopefully I don't glow in the dark. I might go find myself a light globe and see if I can do an uncle fester to find my way around the house at night :DThe past month and a bit has been hilariously hectic - which is why I've pretty much been an internet-no-show for the past 6 weeks or so (when was my last post? when I shaved my head? yeah.. figured as much)
I've got so much to tell, but I only want to talk about my car at the moment. You all know about my car. You all know how much I luuuuuuuuuuuuuurve my car ♥♥♥ and you all know how sad I'm going to be (is it really possible to die of laughter? coz I'm thinking that I might..) when the
Ahh where do I start? In the middle? Nah.. might as well start at the beginning..
The carpark at my work is a death trap. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but every time you turn a corner when you're leaving or entering that place, you're guaranteed to almost come to a head on collision. I've managed to avoid one, til recently. See, what happens is you get all the way to the boom gate out of the garage and breathe a sigh of relief coz you've managed to not hit the benzes and the beemers and the alfas and what not with your shitbox Camry wagon, you drive out of the gate and then BOOM a 2 week old mazda 3 drives into your front end.
Ahhhhhhhhhh shit. Okay so it's not my fault, but because I don't have insurance on the bus, and because AAMI are an asshole of an insurance company, they're now trying to screw me sideways. The first thing they said to me was "After an investigation, we've concluded that you're at fault.."
Investigation?
WHAT FUCKING INVESTIGATION?
No serious - wouldn't an investigation include um.. i dunno.. asking ME what fucking happened?
Apparently not.
So yeah, that's been fun - it's still unresolved, and my car still has (apparently) $2500 worth of damage.. which basically means, my car is a repairable write off if they decide that I'm not actually at fault, which I'm not, but I'm sure that they're going to fuck me sideways until they're absolutely certain that I'm actually telling the truth.
I mean, seriously, as IF I'd drive my piece of shit into a 2 week old mazda 3.
So there was that.. and then..
Three days later, I'm sitting at the lights waiting for them to go green (mind you, I was in a shit mood coz it was hot and mum dragged me to see the wiggles - which was okay coz they sang quack quack cockadoodle .. don't ask.. but yeah anyway..) when all of a sudden, my VERY STATIONARY car moved forward about 2 feet. The worst thing about this was that there was a very very expensive Jag infront of me. Yeah.. holy fuck I'm glad that the light turned green when the car behind me (a 1982 ford laser mind you..) hit the back end of my car.
Luckily, there was no damage to my car, but the poor bugger who hit my car, his front end got demolished. Dunno how that happens, but yeah.. I felt so bad for him, especially considering the first thing he said when he got out of the car was "oh.. my fucking.. OMG.. my mum's gonna KILL ME!!" I kind of chuckled at that, even tho I know the situation is nowhere near funny, but hey, his car is the borked one, not mine (oh wait.. yeah it is, just not in the corner he hit).. He followed it up with "oh shit.. man I'm sorry.. and you have a kid in the car, are you both ok?"
Now, before that point I'd decided it wasn't worth going thru the whole insurance thing with this guy - there's jack shit wrong with where he hit my car, and his front end is messed up bad.. but after he said that? I told him "look, just tell your mum you were parked at the shopping centre.. it's christmas.. and say that's how you found the car.."
This guy was so happy that he hugged me three times and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
That's gratitude for you :D
So yeah, that was a kind of sad story with a happy ending.. but then..
Each year, Jay, B and I go driving around to look at christmas lights. It's a tradition. We go to dinner. We order the same sort of meal every year, we drive around til it's dark looking for adventures, then we go to the christmas tree light farm.. then we drive around some more looking at everyone's homes and enjoying the light displays.
This year, it all got screwed up. It rained. and rained. and rained and rained AND RAINED SOME MORE! There was an absolute downpour and roads were flooding.. it was insane.
So like.. what's the first thing you expect me to do in a situation like that?
Drive around of course.
So we drive around looking for adventures, B falls asleep in the back (that's how shit it was) and then I go to the shop to do my paperwork. On the way to the shop, we drove up and down this road with a HUGE dip in it that every time you went down you felt like you were on a roller coaster and ended up with your stomach hanging around somewhere near your tonsils.. and then as you drive back up - your stomach ends up near your toes. Of course, this only really works at 60kms/h or more.. so yeah... you can imagine how fast I was going. It's not a great idea though, coz the first thing you want to do as you're going down the dip is close your eyes and cover your face with your hands - it takes a lot of guts i mean.. stupidity.. to do what we did with our eyes open. That, my friends, was the highlight for the night until..
I finish up my paperwork and then it's time for me and Jay to go home. Half way home, WOOSH we drive thru a huge ass puddle and me being me.. and jay being jay.. we get excited and decide we should go looking for more fun puddles to drive thru. At that same moment, a cop car drives past, lights flashing - and for about 4 seconds we consider following it.. then I remember that my headlight is broken (it still works, it's just smashed up) and that maybe following police cars at midnight with a car that could um.. possibly.. be unroadworthy.. would be a bad idea.
Isn't it just our luck that the next thing that passes us is a fire engine?
So what did we do? We're at the street we need to turn into to head to my place.. and what did we do? What do you think we did? We followed the fire engine didn't we? Yeah, it wasn't a good idea... we know this now. At that time though (midnight to be exact), it seemed to be a fantastic idea. Mr Fireman is driving his firetruck and turns a corner, we go to follow and get a red arrow.
Goddamnit we can't follow him anymore. Poop.
So we drive straight, and hit another puddle.. WOOHOO! Puddles yay! I figure (in the tiny little brain of mine) that maybe if we turned right, we could somehow cut the fire engine off and meet it up at the next intersection..
I wasn't counting on the road being flooded was I?
So - we're off looking for puddles.. and fire engines.. and then, a puddle finds us. Seriously this thing was all the way across the road, four cars long and about half a wheel deep. It didn't even look like there was a puddle (river?) on the road, it just looked like the road was wet.. which it was.. but we didn't realise it was THAT wet! The first thing we did when we hit the puddle was shit a brick. At least I had enough common sense not to brake, which is what I wanted to do.. I slowed down (water was pouring all over the car from the rain and from the puddle) and we make it all the way thru without any hassle, we both look at eachother and breathe a big sigh of relief.
Then..
the electricals all start to die.
Lights start flickering.. engine starts straining.. stuff starts going weird..
3 metres out of the puddle.. and the car dies.
You know how people have "famous last words"? My famous last words at that moment were "oops"
Jay pointed out that it was a bit of an understatement.. she wasn't far wrong. We sat in the car, in the rain, for half an hour trying to get it started.. we then figured it was time to call the RACV.. you know what I hear? "there is an approximate 10 minute wait before we can attend your call.. and approximately a 3 hour wait before we can service you" or something like that. Just. Fucking. Great.
We sit in the car, and debate.. I choose, at that moment, to point out to Jay that we were looking for an adventure.. she chose (rightly so) to point out that I'm an idiot (even though she didn't use those exact words..) and we continued brainstorming.
Suggestion 1: Ring my brother the mechanic?
Answer: No.
Reason: He'll kill me for waking him up. He'll kill me for waking up his pregnant wife. He'll just kill me.
Suggestion 2: Ring my dad
Answer: No
Reason: I'll never hear the end of it. He'll kill me also. And I'll never live it down.
Suggestion 3: Ring the RACV back
Answer: Tried
Outcome: Hung up - same as above. Grrr!
Suggestion 4: Ring Jay's mum
Answer: No
Reason: She lives 1/2 an hour away..
Reconsideration: Better than getting killed by my parents/brother.
So we call JayMum. She's not impressed to say the least, but she's a good JayMum and she comes out to rescue her daughter, and her daughter's idiot best friend. She eventually gets there and we try to jump the car.
Not gonna happen.
We try and try and try and each time.. nothing happens.. then, a gift from the gods alights from the train passing by (he actually got off the train coz he thought the bottleshop was open at midnight right? yeah in st. albans.. what a goose..) and comes across to help us.
You know what the best words to hear are when you're broken down on the side of the road in the rain? "what's up ladies? I'm a mechanic.."
He tried absolutely everything to get my car going for about 2 hours. He eventually had to concede defeat and said "I can't get the distributor cap off.. and I bet that's what it is.."
So we go home. Leave my car on the nature strip (sorry Jay, I know you said you weren't gonna push my car hahaha oh you got jibbed lol) and go home.
The next morning I go back to my car, call the RACV and he's there within 10 minutes. You know you have a shit car when the first words out of the mechanics mouth are "Hi Tan, nice to see you again.. what's wrong this time?" (he was out to jump my car earlier that week).. I explained what happened, and he laughed. He took the distributor cap off and lo and behold.. 2 cups of water fall out.
It's kind of hard to make your car work when it's DROWNING.
You know how he fixed it? Wiped the inside down with a towel, sprayed some WD40 inside it and screwed the cap back on.
Viola! Car go workie yay!
Ahh.. you think that's the end do you? Well.. it's not..
The car's okay for a week or three .. I thought that maybe the wash the engine got was doing the car good.. but yah, a couple of weeks and it's time to have the car jumped again. Instead of ringing My RACV guy, I ring my friend Caz.. I know she's on her way to the shop that I'm managing (hahah I pretend I'm boss and no one listens anyway) so I call her and say "come past my place, jumpstart my car please?" and she does so. She's a good friend like that.
The bus is not happy. It doesn't want to go. It doesn't want to start. I kicked it and said "start you fucking stupid thing or I'm gonna take a sledgehammer to you".. and it still didn't start..
Eventually, I just let the battery charge off her car while hers was running.. lo and behold.. the bus starts.
Now.. I know that I should turn off the car I jumped mine off, but we were in a rush to get to the shop and open up, so I grabbed the leads and took them both off my battery, black first, red next.. as I was grabbing the black lead tho, my fingers went inbetween the clamps and I felt a very strong tingle running up my arm.
I fucking electrocuted (okay, overexaggeration) myself. 12 volts of power shot thru me. It was over with in a second or two, and I was okay.. til my arm started to tingle.. and my hand went all numb.. and then I had no feeling whatsoever in my arm and I'm getting weird heart palpitations.
I head off to the doctor's and after the usual pleasantries he says "So what've you done to yourself this time Tanja?" I explain what happened.. and he sits there and smirks at me and says "well.. Tanja.. you're a bright spark aren't you?"
Oh the fucking hilarity.
He gave me the day off, so I let my bosses know I wasn't going to be in. One of them sends an sms back - "I guess you're gonna be charged and ready to go tomorrow?" oh ha ha..
follow it with comments such as "Ohm-i-god" and "that's shocking" and "amp-parrently cars arent meant to jump start people" from various family (*glares at my dad*) I'm surrounded by fucking comedians.
I hope they keep their day jobs and don't CHARGE people for listening to their jokes.. *boom tish*
And so that's that.. or is it? There's still two days before I go to check this new car out
who knows what'll happen between now and saturday morning.
(yeah I'm okay now.. just injured my pride lol)
Speedy Bubbles
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