A Christmas Story.
Gather round children and hear of tale about how Uncle Jason spent a Christmas trying to figure out why his new car wouldn’t start.
Twas the day of Christmas and all through the house all the creatures were stirring even that lazy old dog was chasing a mouse. When what do my ears do hear but a small request for some more yellow beer. So me and brother all wrapped up in our gear, loaded up into the BMW for more beer. When to our surprise my chariot would not start.
“Well this is odd,” I said with disdain. “Why won’t your car start, bro?” my brother exclaimed.
Scratching my head I did what I thought best, I called BMW assist. “We will get a tow truck with battery pack out to you sir” said the man on the phone. “Sweet,” I thought, think soon all my troubles would be gone.
Unfortunately, that was not so. It turned out that when the tow truck called me he decided it was best not to come and fry my car. You see the latest information he had was on a 2004 545i which, probably, wasn’t much different then my car but he didn’t want to chance it. So I said fine and decided to call the service technician in the morning.
The next morning I arose bright and early and called a service tech at I.G. Burton in Milford, DE (the closest BMW service center) where he instructed me on how todo a battery reset. Again, I was a bit giddy hoping that this would fix my car. So it was myself and my dad outside dismantling the trunk of my car to get at the battery. After disconnecting the negative lead, my father thinking he was helping, closed the trunk lid.
This was of course a problem since my trunk release relies on electricity and all the electricity has been removed from the car. After about 30 seconds of panicing, I ran inside to do a search on the interweb about manual releasing my trunk. The first post I came to instructed me on how to remove my back speaker and use the manual release hatch underneath that. Fearing that I would absolutely “fuck” this up, I read further. I found another post describing that turning the key all the way to the left would do a manual release. And after about 3 tries that’s exactly what happened.
Now with my trunk lid open again and the battery completely reattached, I attempted to start my car. Again I was met with nothing, not a start up sound not anything. So I called BMW Assist again and told them to come and get this car and haul it up to the service center. When the tow truck arrived at my parent’s house again I was met with another problem.
You see the car wouldn’t allow me to turn the steering wheel or depress the brake, and the tow driver needed the car in neutral to get up on the flat bed. This would be a problem since I needed to depress the brake peddle down to get the car into neutral. Again, I called the service tech at I.G. Burton where he instructed me to steal my own car. Seriously, it’s freaky, but I won’t post it here.
Finally the car was placed on the tow truck and hauled off to the service center. All was going to be good in the world as, hopefully, this would be fixed quickly. After about an hour I get a call from the service tech saying that they got the car but they didn’t get the key to the car. “CRAP!” I had to now drive up to Milford, DE from Delmar, MD (about an hour) to deliver the key. When I got there I asked when they would get to look at my car. The Service manager told me “this afternoon.” Only problem was that it was already 2:30pm and they closed at 5pm. There wasn’t much afternoon left for them todo anything.
After visiting the one and only winery in Deleware, I got a call from the Service Manager.
“Success! Mr. Tucker we have found the problem! One of your battery cables that powers the essential systems went bad.”
“Great, when can I get my car?” I asked.
“Thursday.”
“Thursday? But you know what the problem is, why would it take so long?”
“Well, we need to overnight the part and we missed the cutoff for today.” To which I think I must have started wheeping because we quickly got off the phone.
(to be continued).
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