A day of twists and turns
So last night Jessica went out, and since her car needs some maintenance, she took mine.
At 5 AM, just as I was very groggily finishing a comic and about to go to sleep, she called to say she couldn't find her keys... or my car key. They had looked all over the place at Aaron and Squish's place, where she was, and could not find them. She figured they must have been locked up in my car; since they weren't visible she probably set them on the back seat before putting some bags right on top of them.
Normally, we could get into my car by using the spare key that David carries and occasionally uses. But, he had just gone out of town for the #WiiGii! New Year gathering in Memphis. So we would need either AAA (which Aaron is a member of) or my keyless entry transmitter, which I have never carried in 11 years of owning the car because it is so bulky. I looked around a bit while on the phone with her, but wasn't sure where I might have left it, so we just had Aaron bring her home, and we'd figure it out in the daytime after we'd all slept.
I got up at around noon, Jessica still sleeping, and spent about half an hour looking around for the transmitter. It's not in any of the places that it would be, if it were here at all, and eventually I figured that I probably left it in my sock drawer at my dad's old house in Pennsylvania, which he moved out of nearly ten years ago. Which means that the transmitter is probably in a random box with the other stuff I'd left behind in the eaves of Dad's new house in South Carolina. Not helpful.
Maggie occasionally uses my car, so it occured to me that there was a small chance David had left his key behind for her. She was out -- actually I thought she was napping at the time -- so I texted David to see if he had happened to leave it at home. And... he had! Maggie borrowed it from him a few days earlier and still had it, he said. I then realized she was out, not asleep, so I called her... and she said the key wasn't on her ring. She thought she had given it back to him. I double-checked with David and he definitely didn't have it on his ring either, so... it is somewhere in the house, and may or may not have been given back to him, but neither of them knew where it was.
So, my car was at Aaron's house, locked, with the keys inside. Jessica's car was at our house, but also locked, and her keys were also inside my car across town. I borrowed Maggie's car and Jessica and I went out to run some errands, to culminate in going to Aaron's place where he would call AAA for us.
On our way across town, I realized Maggie's car sounded kind of loud, like the engine was trying awfully hard. Jessica eventually commented on it too, at which point I gave it a second thought and noticed that the tachometer was really high... almost redlining... and that we were still in second gear, going 65 mph on the highway. (The car is an automatic, but it has a tachometer and an LED display to tell you what gear it's in.) Even when I did redline the engine, it wouldn't shift into third gear. Jessica suggested turning off the car and restarting, something that would sometimes fix her car when that happened, but it didn't do any good. Eventually, though, I realized that the car only misbehaved when I had the shifter in the main "D5" setting. If I put it lower, it would cap the maximum gear, but the automatic shifting began to work again, so I used D4 from that point on. Much better performance.
As Jessica and I were leaving the mall to go to Aaron's, she got a call from him -- when he went out to my car to call the AAA guy to come unlock it, he accidentally locked himself out of his own house. Thankfully his roommate Squish would be on her way home from work shortly and could let us all in there, but Aaron still ended up standing outside in the sub-freezing weather for about 20 minutes overall until Jessica and I arrived and gave him shelter in Maggie's car.
The AAA guy eventually arrived and opened up the car for us using a technique I hadn't seen before. They used to stick a grabber into the door between the window and the rubber lining, but instead he had an inflatable wedge to crack the door a bit, and then just used a bent metal rod to reach into the cabin and press my power lock button.
So we got inside, checked under the bags... and the keys were not there.
We looked all over the car, but the keys were not inside it. The AAA guy offered to call out a locksmith who could make a new key on the spot using some sort of wax mold, but it would potentially cost some money out of pocket, so Jessica and Aaron went back into his house to look around a little more while I stayed outside and chatted with the AAA guy.
I learned from him that you can get a higher priority (and faster service) from the AAA dispatcher if you are blocking people at a gas station or have a living animal in your car such as a pet or baby. You can even get a faster response by saying that you're in a "bad neighborhood" and are scared. So, keep that in mind, everyone. :)
After 10 minutes or so Jessica called me from inside to say they had located the keys -- another guest from last night, Christine, took them by mistake! So, I told the AAA guy he could go, we wouldn't need the locksmith. He asked if I wanted to re-lock my car since we'd found the keys, and since Jessica and her friend (Other Jessica) had shopping bags in there still, I did.
Inside, I found out that the keys were ~30 minutes away in Canal Winchester (very close to where robowang lives it turned out), and that Christine wasn't bringing them to us. Jessica, Aaron, and Squish needed to leave basically immediately to get to their New Year's party in Dayton. So, since I didn't really need my car for the next day, we decided I would take Jessica home in Maggie's car so she could pack her overnight bag, and then Aaron would pick her up from our house and they'd head out. Christine had a key to their house too, so she could drop them off if she came to check on the cats... or Jessica's group could simply pick them up when they came back to town, and then Jessica could drive my car home from Aaron's. This sounded like a good plan.
Then Jessica asked me to go grab Other Jessica's bags from the car, since she needed them tonight. But... I had re-locked the car because I was told we knew where the keys were and assumed we would be getting them shortly. Other Jessica's stuff was now trapped and we would need to get the keys back today -- not tomorrow -- and my Jessica needed to go home to pack. The new plan became for Aaron and Squish to take Jessica home to pack, and then leave straightaway. Meanwhile I would drive to the other girl's place to get the keys, then drive home, then have Other Jessica pick me up and take me back to Aaron's so I could get her stuff to her and drive myself home.
Aaron looked up directions to Christine's for me, and I took off. On the way there, the "low gas" light came on, and almost immediately after I got stuck for 10 minutes in a phantom traffic jam. With other traffic hinderances, it eneded up taking me over half an hour to get to Christine's apartment complex. I drove a complete circuit looking at addresses before I decided that the number I got from Aaron was wrong. It said 5302 but all of the apartments seemed to start with "6". So, I figured the first number was just wrong and looked for 6302. I drove back and forth down one side of the giant complex several times looking, running lower on gas all the while, and finally stopped at a building labelled, in its big stone slabs visible from the street, with 6306 and 6310, and other higher numbers. I called Christine, whose number I thankfully had with me, and she came out of the building I'd been staring at, the one labelled only with numbers that were near, but larger than, hers. If the numbers had at least spanned hers, I would have been confident enough to walk all around it checking every door. But no, apparently the owners felt that listing only half of the apartments in a given building on its front face was good enough.
Finally done with my trials, I got a few gallons of gas to make up for driving Maggie's car to Aaron's friend Christine's house to get my and Jessica's keys so I could unlock my car and get the stuff that Other Jessica needed that was locked in my car because my Jessica had driven it instead of hers. It was a bit like a fetch quest in a video game but way less enjoyable.
I got home, Other Jessica showed up, we got my car and her bags, and I went home, finally sitting to relax nearly 6 hours after leaving for lunch with Jessica. I am very happy to be just sitting around doing nothing now.
At 5 AM, just as I was very groggily finishing a comic and about to go to sleep, she called to say she couldn't find her keys... or my car key. They had looked all over the place at Aaron and Squish's place, where she was, and could not find them. She figured they must have been locked up in my car; since they weren't visible she probably set them on the back seat before putting some bags right on top of them.
Normally, we could get into my car by using the spare key that David carries and occasionally uses. But, he had just gone out of town for the #WiiGii! New Year gathering in Memphis. So we would need either AAA (which Aaron is a member of) or my keyless entry transmitter, which I have never carried in 11 years of owning the car because it is so bulky. I looked around a bit while on the phone with her, but wasn't sure where I might have left it, so we just had Aaron bring her home, and we'd figure it out in the daytime after we'd all slept.
I got up at around noon, Jessica still sleeping, and spent about half an hour looking around for the transmitter. It's not in any of the places that it would be, if it were here at all, and eventually I figured that I probably left it in my sock drawer at my dad's old house in Pennsylvania, which he moved out of nearly ten years ago. Which means that the transmitter is probably in a random box with the other stuff I'd left behind in the eaves of Dad's new house in South Carolina. Not helpful.
Maggie occasionally uses my car, so it occured to me that there was a small chance David had left his key behind for her. She was out -- actually I thought she was napping at the time -- so I texted David to see if he had happened to leave it at home. And... he had! Maggie borrowed it from him a few days earlier and still had it, he said. I then realized she was out, not asleep, so I called her... and she said the key wasn't on her ring. She thought she had given it back to him. I double-checked with David and he definitely didn't have it on his ring either, so... it is somewhere in the house, and may or may not have been given back to him, but neither of them knew where it was.
So, my car was at Aaron's house, locked, with the keys inside. Jessica's car was at our house, but also locked, and her keys were also inside my car across town. I borrowed Maggie's car and Jessica and I went out to run some errands, to culminate in going to Aaron's place where he would call AAA for us.
On our way across town, I realized Maggie's car sounded kind of loud, like the engine was trying awfully hard. Jessica eventually commented on it too, at which point I gave it a second thought and noticed that the tachometer was really high... almost redlining... and that we were still in second gear, going 65 mph on the highway. (The car is an automatic, but it has a tachometer and an LED display to tell you what gear it's in.) Even when I did redline the engine, it wouldn't shift into third gear. Jessica suggested turning off the car and restarting, something that would sometimes fix her car when that happened, but it didn't do any good. Eventually, though, I realized that the car only misbehaved when I had the shifter in the main "D5" setting. If I put it lower, it would cap the maximum gear, but the automatic shifting began to work again, so I used D4 from that point on. Much better performance.
As Jessica and I were leaving the mall to go to Aaron's, she got a call from him -- when he went out to my car to call the AAA guy to come unlock it, he accidentally locked himself out of his own house. Thankfully his roommate Squish would be on her way home from work shortly and could let us all in there, but Aaron still ended up standing outside in the sub-freezing weather for about 20 minutes overall until Jessica and I arrived and gave him shelter in Maggie's car.
The AAA guy eventually arrived and opened up the car for us using a technique I hadn't seen before. They used to stick a grabber into the door between the window and the rubber lining, but instead he had an inflatable wedge to crack the door a bit, and then just used a bent metal rod to reach into the cabin and press my power lock button.
So we got inside, checked under the bags... and the keys were not there.
We looked all over the car, but the keys were not inside it. The AAA guy offered to call out a locksmith who could make a new key on the spot using some sort of wax mold, but it would potentially cost some money out of pocket, so Jessica and Aaron went back into his house to look around a little more while I stayed outside and chatted with the AAA guy.
I learned from him that you can get a higher priority (and faster service) from the AAA dispatcher if you are blocking people at a gas station or have a living animal in your car such as a pet or baby. You can even get a faster response by saying that you're in a "bad neighborhood" and are scared. So, keep that in mind, everyone. :)
After 10 minutes or so Jessica called me from inside to say they had located the keys -- another guest from last night, Christine, took them by mistake! So, I told the AAA guy he could go, we wouldn't need the locksmith. He asked if I wanted to re-lock my car since we'd found the keys, and since Jessica and her friend (Other Jessica) had shopping bags in there still, I did.
Inside, I found out that the keys were ~30 minutes away in Canal Winchester (very close to where robowang lives it turned out), and that Christine wasn't bringing them to us. Jessica, Aaron, and Squish needed to leave basically immediately to get to their New Year's party in Dayton. So, since I didn't really need my car for the next day, we decided I would take Jessica home in Maggie's car so she could pack her overnight bag, and then Aaron would pick her up from our house and they'd head out. Christine had a key to their house too, so she could drop them off if she came to check on the cats... or Jessica's group could simply pick them up when they came back to town, and then Jessica could drive my car home from Aaron's. This sounded like a good plan.
Then Jessica asked me to go grab Other Jessica's bags from the car, since she needed them tonight. But... I had re-locked the car because I was told we knew where the keys were and assumed we would be getting them shortly. Other Jessica's stuff was now trapped and we would need to get the keys back today -- not tomorrow -- and my Jessica needed to go home to pack. The new plan became for Aaron and Squish to take Jessica home to pack, and then leave straightaway. Meanwhile I would drive to the other girl's place to get the keys, then drive home, then have Other Jessica pick me up and take me back to Aaron's so I could get her stuff to her and drive myself home.
Aaron looked up directions to Christine's for me, and I took off. On the way there, the "low gas" light came on, and almost immediately after I got stuck for 10 minutes in a phantom traffic jam. With other traffic hinderances, it eneded up taking me over half an hour to get to Christine's apartment complex. I drove a complete circuit looking at addresses before I decided that the number I got from Aaron was wrong. It said 5302 but all of the apartments seemed to start with "6". So, I figured the first number was just wrong and looked for 6302. I drove back and forth down one side of the giant complex several times looking, running lower on gas all the while, and finally stopped at a building labelled, in its big stone slabs visible from the street, with 6306 and 6310, and other higher numbers. I called Christine, whose number I thankfully had with me, and she came out of the building I'd been staring at, the one labelled only with numbers that were near, but larger than, hers. If the numbers had at least spanned hers, I would have been confident enough to walk all around it checking every door. But no, apparently the owners felt that listing only half of the apartments in a given building on its front face was good enough.
Finally done with my trials, I got a few gallons of gas to make up for driving Maggie's car to Aaron's friend Christine's house to get my and Jessica's keys so I could unlock my car and get the stuff that Other Jessica needed that was locked in my car because my Jessica had driven it instead of hers. It was a bit like a fetch quest in a video game but way less enjoyable.
I got home, Other Jessica showed up, we got my car and her bags, and I went home, finally sitting to relax nearly 6 hours after leaving for lunch with Jessica. I am very happy to be just sitting around doing nothing now.