Fuses

A couple of weeks ago, Melissa and I traveled down to Yucaipa for a baby shower for my niece. We took the Camry that my dad had recently handed down to me.

http://mostly-musing.blogspot.com/2013/04/another-car-story.html

It was a really long trip but Melissa is good company and we had a lot of fun. Anyway, the Camry enabled us to have a GPS plugged into one power outlet and a phone recharging on the other power outlet, a luxury that my Buick hadn't had. Everything worked great. But then, the next weekend, I plugged in my phone and realized that I was getting no power. I tried the other outlet - nothing. I was bummed. I mean, I've got to be able to have constant available power for all these gadgets, right? The car was going to be going into the shop soon for routine servicing but rather than depend on someone else I decided to break down and read the car manual and see if I could figure it out.

After a bit of studying, I came to the conclusion that it must be a fuse. I set about attempting to find and replace the damaged fuses. I was impressed to read in the manual that some extra fuses were provided. How convenient! And, there was even a little plastic fuse-getter-outer to use to try and grab those little suckers. My fat, stubby fingers didn't do so well with that, though, so I resorted to using needle nose pliers to remove the fuses. My first attempt, however, didn't produce any results. I realized that there were several fuse locations. I wasn't reading the manual carefully enough and the first fuse I replaced went to, well, I don't know what it went to. It just didn't fix my power outlets. I tried again and realized that I was in the totally wrong fuse area. I was trying to replace fuses that were in the fuse box under the hood when I needed to be replacing fuses located under my dashboard. O.K. Got it. I eventually figured out which fuses needed to be replaced, and voila! I had power again. I was so proud of myself! In fact, I was feeling so cocky that I even posted it on Facebook, like it was some miraculous accomplishment. I mean, I was really proud...

Now if you look at the picture in the following link, you will see the location of the spare fuses. This is an important detail that we will come back to later.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10200904439675596&l=33cb8b4dda

Several nights later I was out at Jenny's house visiting while Zac was working out of town. Melissa was there too and she walked me out when I got ready to head home. I started the car, turned on the headlights, and started to back out of Jen's driveway. Hmmm...I noticed that I had no headlights. Turned them off, then on again. Nope. Tried the high beams. Yea! I had high beams but still no low. I could have driven home with the high beams on all the way but I would have pissed off a few people.

It suddenly occurred to me that this just couldn't be coincidental. After all, I had been messing around with the fuses. Melissa thought I was crazy but I was determined to get to the bottom of this before I left Jenny's. So, once again, I got out the manual, my flashlight, and the fuse-getter-outer. Read the manual again. Turns out that I had grabbed fuses that were above the spares when I had done my fabulous repair job. Didn't read the diagram quite right. So...I had taken the low beam fuses from their proper position and put them in the spot for the power outlets. I could charge my phone but drive in the dark.

Back they went into their appropriate spots. I drove home happily and the next day I went to Wal-Mart and bought more fuses. Now my power outlets are once again working, as are my headlights, and I have extra fuses in my glove box. (It had turned out that I didn't have enough spares.)

The moral of this story? Does there need to be one? I still feel pretty good about getting it all fixed myself but I have to laugh about posting my good deed so early on Facebook. Ah, pride. Gets me every time.