The Saga of Stupid Freaking Metal Bits, Part I

So this past week has been longer and more tiring than usual.

Monday night LOML limps into the house after his class and falls on the bed in a nigh-catatonic state due to his knee being super messed up and him falling on his way to class. After devoted a lot of time to knee-rubbing so he could actually speak coherently, he looked at me with sad pathetic puppy-dog eyes and asked if I could go for Taco Bell. Being not completely hard-hearted, I headed out the door and to my Ford Escort '94, drove to Taco Bell, placed an order, and waited patiently behind the car that was currently at the window.

Then I realized that my radio wasn't playing. I didn't think that I had turned it off, but whatever. I went to turn it on and it stayed cold and dark. Oh well, just another stupid thing to break down on my car. The car in front of me went to pull away and I went to pull forward.

Sput, sput, sputter, silent, went the car.

"What the hell!" I said. Turning the key did not get the car to start again; however it had enough power to beep annoyingly at me as I opened the door to inform the lovely Taco Bell denizens that their drive thru was blocked. They took it better than I probably would have. They even got all helpful and started climbing through the window to attempt to push it out of the way.

Except it was in park and couldn't be gotten out of park with the engine off. Which meant my erstwhile POS wasn't going anywhere. One of the TB employees brought his car the wrong way in through the drive thru and we hooked up jumper cables, enabling the car to get out of park. Upon removing the cables, however, the engine died faster than a canary in a bad coal mine. However two TB employees were able to at least push it out of the drive through. I did collect my order first and called LOML to tell him that if he wanted num-nums in the next several hours he was going to have to come get them. I then called AAA (I knew I was paying for their membership for some reason) and summoned a tow truck.

This is exactly what tow trucks look like.

Meanwhile, my driver window was down and it started to rain like the wrath of Poseidon. I ended up sitting in the middle where there's no real seat and waited patiently for LOML and tow truck to show up. I got a call from AAA in the meantime to inform me that it was going to be about 40 minutes before the tow truck showed up.

LOML showed up and, instead of taking the food and running away, stayed and helped me while away the minutes while we ate our TB food.

To Be Continued....