randomaccess

5 March, 2005

Driving two vehicles, one north of 140,000 and one approaching 200,000, across the country in ten days of nearly continuous operation, one has to expect some kind of break down. Today we had our first. I pulled into a Race Trac gas station, filled up my tank, washed the windshield, got in, turned the key, and got nothing but a big click. Well, really there was first a small, pathetic sound of an electric motor struggling to turn and then failing. Then came the click. Tried it again, and again the click. Waited a few minutes and tried again. Click. I open up the hood and poke around. No fuses blown. No loose connections. I used the fan as a lever to turn the crankshaft/flywheel around a bit. Tried again. Click.

Ok, so it’s time for AAA. I give them a call. Their voice mail hold music sounds like its coming from a partially demagnitized tape, with waves of static and noise. At first I thought my cell connection was bad, but then I noticed that the “we value your call” messages that interrupted the music periodically were crystal clear. I momentarily considered the possibility that the noise was intended to increase the liklihood that callers would hang up before forcing the allocation of AAA resources, but I banished this as a paranoid rumbling born of my annoyance with the part failure. When somebody on their end benificently decides to take me off hold, things go pretty smoothly. They send out a truck. I wait.

It strikes me at this point that my truck has been blocking two pumps at this gas station for something like 15 minutes. I wonder if anyone is going to come out and give me grief. I glance at my drivers’ side mirror, and see this guy coming up. He had been waiting in his car behind the trailer for a few minutes. Ooops. I apologized, saying I just didn’t see his car. Oh well. Geez. So now I’m sitting in the cab, waiting for the AAA truck, waiting for the management to come out and yell at me, waiting for other cars to pull up behind me… Click. Yep, still busted.

I call my folks and let them know what’s going on. They turn around. They’ll be back in about 15 minutes. Still waiting. My folks pull up. The AAA truck arrives. The tow truck guy is looking at the trailer and shaking his head. We try a bunch of stuff. In the end we’re able to chain my truck to his truck and put around the gas station parking lot in a big, lazy circle — leaving the trailer out of the traffic flow and the truck somewhere where it could be loaded onto his tilting, hydraulic flatbed truck. It surprised me, but people were still trying to dart in and out of the pumps as we were moving something north of 10,000 lbs of daisy chained trucks and trailers around. We managed to pull all this off without hitting anyone.

My folks stayed with the trailer. The tow truck guy and I went off to look for a mechanic who was still working. In Montgomery, it seems, all mechanics knock off work and head home at noon on Saturday. While this seems quite reasonable, it was going to be pretty inconvenient. We drove up and down the main drag looking for a shop. We found open doors at Tri-County Transmissions (in Montgomery, AL), and Mike and his two brothers were on hand and willing to replace a starter.

These guys were great. They tried jumping it before anything else, and even once they got the starter out they tried zapping it directly to see if it was just jammed. When everyone was convinced the starter motor was really dead, they called a guy who had a replacement in stock and was willing to run it over. While we were waiting for the part to show up we chatted a bit. One brother was welding for the teamsters up in New Jersey for a few years, but got sick of working in the cold. He and his brother decided to buy the transmission business from an old guy who wanted to retire. They’ve had it for a couple of years and have grown it pretty substantially in that time, more than doubling the gross from when the old guy was running it — partly by picking up ad hoc jobs like mine.

They checked my tranny fluid and zip-tied some hanging wires up out ofthe way while the truck was up on the lift. They liked my trick-bumper. We looked at different drive shafts and wondered why they had gotten so much wider from ‘68 to 2000. The youngest brother was thinking about moving to California, so we chatted a bit about that. The main thing he wanted to know was whether there was anything to do there. I assured him there were many things to do.

The part showed up, we popped it in, and everything was cool. God, what a relief. We’d had the truck up on the lift for about an hour so I expected at least an hour labor charge, but these guys charged me just $25 (plus the cost of the part, of course). Outstanding. If you break down in Montgomery, go there.

So, with a working starter everything else was pretty straight forward. I went back to the RaceTrac, picked up my parents and the trailer, got back on 85 and headed north. The whole thing soaked a little more than two hours, so we didn’t make it to Charlotte as planned. Instead we got as far as Commerce, GA. Really. That’s the name. There’s at least twelve motels and what seems like a million chain restaurants. And no crosswalks. The Red Roof Inn advertised high speed wireless on a freeway billboard, and I pulled into their parking lot to check it out. Have it they did, and their DNS didn’t suck like the Ramadas’ have, so we checked in. We had some decent Mexican food across the street at La Hacienda. Nothing like Grigg’s, but OK.

Sleep time now. Perhaps we’ll actually make it to Chapel Hill tomorrow. I hope so…