I Am Not My Father's Son

What was supposed to be a two hour break for sipping coffee and reading yesterday afternoon turned out to be a 30 minute coffee-break tacked on to the end of an hour-and-a-half exercise in auto mechanics futility. Let us explain.

On the way to church yesterday morning, NPH's wife was honked at by a fellow traveller to inform her that her brakelights weren't working; we've known one was out for some time. Then, later, she was pulled over by a police officer and told the same thing: both her brakelights were out. And while the officer was not going to ticket her, he pointed her to an autoparts store with a stern warning.

So we parked her car in the coffeeshop parking lot and got in the NPH mobile. At the autoparts store, NPH purchased two brakelights and a cheap screwdriver to do the job. Returning to the afflicted vehicle, we discovered that the brakelights are affixed not with a standard or phillips screw, but with star-headed screw. So, frustrated, NPH returned to the autoparts store, borrowed the proper tool from the sympathetice gentleman at the counter, and then twisted, scraped, pulled, and cussed his way through changing the two brakelights in sub 20's temperatures. Job done.

Not really. Because a triumphant return to the coffeeshop was spoiled when NPH's wife got back in the care, pressed the brake pedal, and viola: nothing.

The long-and-short of it is that NPH took his wife to work this morning, then drove the car to a mechanic's, handing the keys off with some self-assured recommendation about fuses, only to have the mechanic retrieve us a short time later with the news that fuses were not involved at all but . . . brakelights. That's right friends, NPH had replaced the wrong bulbs. He had taken perfectly good turn tailight bulbs and replaced them with, well, other perfectly good talight bulbs, leaving the brakelight bulbs untouched.

Cue the music. "Mwah, mwah, mwah, mwaaaaah."

The egg on our face is only now beginning to dry.