Extenuating Circumstances

I like to think of myself as flexible. Not a stickler for little, unimportant details.

But I do like my plans. My schedule of events. And I really dislike when they're completely disrupted by extenuating circumstances.

So my car decides to die last night. In slow, cruel stages. Didn't like cranking up in the morning, but did. Barely cranked after work. A trip to O'Reilly's to check the battery, and it cranked no more. "You only got four volts," the lad says. "Charge it over night," He proceeds to sell me a $20 trickle charger. Then jump starts my car. And off I go.

Only the trickle charger didn't charge anything. The car was COMPLETELY dead this morning. Had to summon the MiL (Gigi) to take the kids to school. Then wait for Cindy to get home because I could use her car to fetch a replacement battery.

"If it is dead, we'll replace it," says a new lad at O'Reilly's.

"It's dead now," I says.

"But we need to test it before we can replace it."

"You need a coroner? It's dead, dude."

"I know," he says. "But we have to test it. And to test it, we have to charge it."

"How long does that take?"

"About an hour."

"An hour?!?"

"Yeah, because it's dead."

"..."

An hour later.

"Okay," he says. "It's dead."

And I get the corpse swapped out. Except... not for free. It was one month (ONE MONTH!) outside the warranty. They did pro-rate it. And for $35, I received a replacement.

After installing it, the car started right up. No more extenuating circumstances...