Friday, September 18, 2009

Lights...are on!

I am very fond of Jamaica Estates, where I park the car frequently. Not so fond though, that I enjoyed coming back to my car at 9:45 PM to find I had left my lights on. I guess I shouldn't complain at all. This could have been a potentially awful situation.

I first tried to push the car northbound on Dalny. This proved futile, as I really couldn't get enough speed to pop-start it. I then managed to push the car through a 3 point turn in the middle of Dalny. I knew the Dalny intersected Hillside at the bottom of a small hill. My thinking was that if the pop-start idea still failed, I was in a better spot to get jump-started, or have someone find me. I called Pedro, and Abdul (who both live in Queens) to see if either were available for help, and got voicemail. So, I pushed towards Hillside.

By the time I reached the start of the hill I was almost running, and had to maneuver myself into the drivers seat, step on the clutch, put the car in third gear, and release the clutch with the ignition on. All without running myself over and sending the Fox, unmanned, into the middle of Hillside Ave. I succeeded in getting in the car, but the battery was so dead, I would have needed MUCH more speed to accomplish a successful pop-start. The car came to rest along the curb, about 15 feet from the corner.

No calls back from the guys, so I started to make it look like I needed help. Hood up, and jumper cables dangling from the fender. I was quite surprised that for a period of about 20 minutes I did not see one police car. Finally a good samaritan in a Nissan truck stopped and offered to jump start me. He seemed very interested in my car (which cost me about 1/100th what his did) and how it ran, what type of gas mileage it got, etc, etc.

After a successful start, I thanked him and offered him half of my order of 16 dumplings from Vanessa's. He didn't seem interested at first until I told him they were still warm.