Ikea furniture does not intimidate me, even if it causes me to cuss from time to time when I try to assemble it. Or, for that matter, when the drawers which were such a bitch to assemble fall apart for the twentieth time in twenty-five openings, but I always put it together again. One of these days, I will take the drill upstairs and make the bed the non-disassembling kind to deal with this problem. I’m not afraid of that either. Nor did I quake in my booties when I realized I had to *buy* the aforementioned drill in the first place, on account of the unassembled picnic table I bought. I have put together four of those silly Muskoka chair kits.
All this is to say that the things the average (at least the average female) consumer is expected to be able to do, I can do. And yet, I become a quivering mess when it comes to doing anything more complicated than changing a windshield wiper or pumping up the tires on my car. Even the windshield wiper mechanism had me in a frustrated heap until someone talked me out of it. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that my response to “I think your low beam is out” is “crap, I guess I’ll make an appointment at Crappy Tire” (Right. It’s Canadian Tire, not Crappy Tire. But after they took a tire with less than 3000km that had a leak so slow that I could get by just with pumping it up every other day, declared it so damaged that it had to be replaced after they had my car up on the hoist, and then, after I’d authorized that, called back to say that they didn’t have a matching tire, I needed to buy TWO tires, but that was a good thing, and I needed to get home, I authorized that but had the presence of mind to say that I wanted to keep the damn tires – and then I showed up, and of course they didn’t have the tires they took off, because they were “so bald” they had to dispose of them. Expensive tires that had less than 3000km on them, right… I *do* call it crappy tire. They declared my perfectly good tires crappy and stuck me with the bill, and completely disregarded my unambiguously worded “please ensure that the tires you take off are returned to me”)
Oh. It seems I am not over that little bit of fun from a year ago. Anyway! My low beam is out! The solution I have is to take the car to Crappy Tire. Kevin makes an appalled face, and gives me the sort of look I give to people who declare that one cannot possibly ever consider living without a clothes dryer. (That look, if you need it spelled out, is roughly interpreted as “are you an idiot? It appears so”) That look works on me, in that it makes me feel like I am fundamentally dumb if I cannot do this myself. Consequently, yesterday I trudged to the store, and flipped open the book that told me what bulbs I needed. I got the right book, though I was a bit confused that they only listed things like blinker lights in the section on “exterior lights”. Are headlights not exterior lights? After many long confused seconds, I saw the “headlights” section. I found my make and model. I got stumped by the year. I can think in terms of 99 and 99.5 for VW Jetta model years (mine is the 99.5), I could even wrap my head around 99A and 99B, but the options I had were “two lights” and “four lights” and something about sealed cartridge even. I have two lights, I thought, triumphantly – a low beam and a high beam! Because, you see, I know that my high beam works, but not my low beam, hence, two lights! But then I realized, I have low beams and high beams on two sides, so I have four lights? Hmmm. I had walked to the store, so I did not go stare at the car. I clung to my, the low beam works, the high beam doesn’t, it must be two.
It never occurred that one bulb could do two different beams. I guess that’s what is meant by dual beam lights. At least, this morning, when I screwed up my courage to remove that cover and remove the bulb, I noticed that a) it did not match the one in the package sitting next to me; and b) there were no other bulbs to investigate under that cover. And that cover was directly behind the headlight. Hmmmm. This is when the dual beam glimmers first began to glow. I confirmed this by reinserting the bulb, and observing low beam gone, high beam there. Then I unplugged it. Low beam gone, no high beam either. I cannot triumphantly report victory.
Oh, also, I finally got out for some paddling.
Posted by Johanna at July 1, 2009 07:14 PM