Why My Rage Is My Master, Part Three

I mentioned about the car, right?

Mrs Stevie ended up picking up the keys and paying for it on Wednesday, and running me down there later that very cold night so I'd have the car for Friday.

I got in, I turned the key, I fired up the engine.

Same misfire, same burning oil smell, and - bestest of all - the check engine light was glowing festively. So nothing that I complained about had been fixed at all.

I broke out some Class Three Words of Power, having suspected that it would be too much to expect a proper mechanic's job of fixing in this computer codes for everything day and age and so reserved the use of Class Fours for when this "repair" proved ineffective.

Yesterday it snowed. They were calling it a "bomb blizzard", a term so monumentally stupid one weatherman exploded on camera, snapping "That isn't a real weather term by the way¹", and it combined snow, not that heavy by the look of it at any one moment in time, with gale force winds gusting up around 60mph in my neck of the suburbs², which amounted to about two feet of snow in the drive, four feet drifting up the side of the car and the back-door (that last courtesy of my next-door neighbor's bleepwit handyman who threw all their snow onto my back porch instead of their own back garden. May he break a shear-pin on the next job.).

So this morning I drove back to Huntignton Hyundai and dropped the car off for round two, pausing only to state unequivocally that I found it bewildering that the car could be pronounced fit for purpose with all three symptoms I complained about still front and center, including Mr Check Engine Light being brightly lit.

The local mechanic who had suggested returning the car to the dealer had performed an oil change before returning the car back to me a week before. Huntington Hyundai called me while I was still attempting to get to work to say that "the" problem was that there was too much oil in the car, and that it would take an hour's labor to fix the issue, which had, naturally, escalated beyond “too much oil”.

This wasn't caught before because "there is no computer code for the problem". I clutched my head with one hand and my smoking wallet with the other and authorized the work, before fighting my way onto a subway train to Brooklyn³.

So now I have to pay for someone to repair the oil change done by someone else, someone I have yet to pay because I haven't had a car with which to drive round to his shop and pay him. I wouldn't bother, but he is a friend who has done us a number of mechanic-type favors in the past. I have to figure out how to tell him he may have a problem staff member though, and I hate being put in that position.

It is all so very annoying.

1. The "bomb" part is a climate science term though, derived from the term for a 24 millibar pressure drop over 24 hours, an event that makes hurricanes in the summer and bloody foul weather in winter↑
2. That's just under 4 kilopascals per square hogshead-newton in metric if I have my sums right↑
3. The Bloody Long Island Railroad was in such disarray that I wasn't getting off the train to Penn Station for any amount of money. Jamaica is very much the antithesis of the good one on a day as cold as this was, and is at the time of writing↑