Frack and Felgercarb.
Today executed a perfect and complete flame-out from start to finish. The events therein absolutely sucked vomit through a sock. My experience at the office today, in which I was forced to stay several hours late, epitomized what happens when too many people get too nitpicky about too many things for their own good. If you’ve always had a burning desire to revise the same webpage over and over because somebody keeps telling you to change the font size up or down one pixel at a time, then you should have been in my shoes today. Really. I would have gladly traded places.
But the new corporate website I designed is finally going live, perhaps even this weekend. By Monday at least. Because that’s what the Big Boss demanded—just about five minutes before he walked out the door on his way to Disney World. Of course, we needed his final sign-off on the content of the site before we could do that, since naturally, the site was massively changed nigh on half a dozen times in the last 48 hours. Big Boss knew that, but he still neglected to tell us that he was going on his trip until his foot was over the threshold, as usual. So my coworker and I realized that we’d have to take the site, implement our final ream of changes in a way that we hoped the Big Boss would find appealing, and run with it.
Anyway, that’s all over and done with. I won’t dwell on my day at the office because the account could fill a hymnal at the Church of Satan. It was pretty weird, actually, walking out of the office at 7:00, after all but two people had gone home. Those two people were on the other side of the building, so it was like leaving your house with all the machines running and the lights on. It’s been pouring rain and cold here all damn day, so when I left the office it was like jumping down one of those holes in Silent Hill 2 into a very dark, wet and nasty place. Not anywhere near as dark, wet and nasty as someplace like Detroit, but hey—it’s all relative.
I decided to stop at the auto parts store on my way home. God knows why I torture myself like this. It was raining, my T/A’s windshield was hopelessly obfuscated thanks to my shit-tastic cheapass wiper blades, and I was hungry. Still, I stopped and subjected myself to the horror that is Advance Auto Parts on Pine Ridge Road. That place is always like the poster child for the phrase “the lunatics are running the asylum.” Every time I go there, I have to just stand in the aisle and chuckle demonically to myself as I witness the parade of human stupidity that is the cashier’s counter at this store. Tonight was no exception. Not like any night has ever been.
Tonight’s Advance Auto Festivities included the driver of a white ‘82 Firebird—which smelled so strongly of air freshener that when he opened up the door ten yards away I smelled it through the rain like a stink bomb gone off—who had captivated the attention of the entire staff of the store with some kind of issue he was having. The customers stacking up in lines all down the length of the counter were being happily ignored by the store’s three employees. Manny, Moe and Jack these three were not. More like Kenny (as in Kenny Rogers, which was who the old man of the bunch looked like), Mullet Head, and Boomer. I thought about buying a fuel filter and some jackstands for KITT, but decided against it. I needed my remaining 13 dollars cash for a hot meal, and it looked like I wasn’t going to be leaving the store before my fiftieth birthday if I expected to actually buy something. I left.
Attempting to turn left out of the parking lot was certainly interesting. Apparently even the God of the Traffic Signal had it in for me, because the bedeviled light refused to turn green. It’s one of those “we think we know better than you” lights that’s programmed not to turn green on a particular side if the ground sensors don’t detect the weight of a vehicle. The problem is, when it’s 7:30, dark, pouring rain and absolutely beyond disgusting outside, it’s impossible to tell if you’re precisely over the two-foot-square area where the sensor resides. I must have missed it, because I sat through two complete light cycles without seeing a green. Oh, yes, the people on the other side of the street—directly across the intersection from me—got to proceed through the light twice. By the end of the second cycle, I conceded defeat and turned right. Who am I to spar with the God of the Traffic Signal?
Picked up some food-I’ll be damned if I was going to go home after what I’d just been through and fire up a bland frozen dinner and wait half an hour for it to cook-picked up the mail, made it back to the house in one piece, somehow, and ate. Watched Battlestar Galactica again. Took much pleasure in it. I think I’m starting to like the word “felgercarb.” It’s some kind of imaginary word the Battlestar writers made up to sound like a futuristic expletive. I know using it makes me a grade-A dork, but what the hell. Embrace your dorkhood, brothers and sisters. It is the only way to be free.
I can think of precisely one pleasant thing that came of this day. A new version of PopTray came out, and it’s a definite improvement. After all, palpable advances in the Automated Taskbar Email Checker Utility market aren’t exactly commonplace (or important), so given my obsessive dependency on such programs, this was a pleasant surprise.
Did I mention I have a cold or some kind of viral thing? It’s very wonderful, I can assure you. Feeling as though each swallow brings you closer to your own home-brew tonsillectomy is certainly not a sensation to be missed. I thought perhaps this Saturday I would go meet a fellow third-gen F-car owner in Ft. Myers and we’d clean our cars up together, but A) he hasn’t mailed me back, and B) I’m going to feel like shit in the morning, I just know it. Guess I’d better go drink some of that throat-scalding DayQuil liquid crap. Boy I can’t wait.
I did hear an amusing story this week. One day last week, after leaving the office at the usual time, I happened to be waiting to make a left turn onto the main thoroughfare (I was driving KITT at the time) when I noticed a familiar car pull up in the lane behind me. It belonged to a coworker, who on one occasion in the past has been known to playfully “jockey for position” with me on the road. He knows I’m a muscle car head, so he plays it up. He himself drives an Acura TL—it’s a couple years old, V6, 240 horsepower or so. Anyway, seeing the guy back there, I got that “feeling” only a car enthusiast gets. A feeling like somebody’s about to give you a run for it, so you’d better put forth a good showing. I notched the gearshift down into D.
Got a clear break, jumped across the southbound lanes and careened into the northbound, dropping the hammer to the firewall as soon as I acquired a straight line. The Formula absolutely flew. The overhauled 700R4’s 2-3 shift, normally a bit sloppy, was so crisp it nearly snapped my neck. Every inch of that car screamed in ecstasy, like during all those wasted hours of driving in seasonal traffic it was just biding its time for when it could really prove its worth. Looking back, I saw my colleague’s Acura in the mirror, it having followed me out into the northbound lanes on the same break in traffic. I could tell he was trying to keep up, probably surprised that I anticipated his playful game, but it wasn’t happening. I ran out of balls approaching 70 miles an hour and quickly curtailed it back to 48ish. For a product of General Motors’ 1980s legacy with 225,000 miles on the clock, that old Formula hauled ass like nobody’s freaking business. I was impressed.
One morning this week was when I heard the amusing story. Another coworker, who had been hitching a ride home with Acura Guy on the occasion I just spoke of, happened to relate to me what had been going on that evening just before the hammer dropped. “Ken thought he’d catch you by surprise,” said my colleague. “He was saying, ‘I’m gonna catcha him, I’m gonna catch him.’ But we couldn’t keep up.” I thought back to that day a week ago and smiled. “Just think of how it’s going to run when I figure out what’s holding it back,” I replied.
So, spurred on by this victory (and my defeat on Wednesday, when I tried and failed yet again to get to the bottom of KITT’s fueling problem), I intend to get out there and buy a fuel filter this weekend, then change it. The car has to be jacked up in the rear to access it, according to the Helm manual, but it’s supposed to be a cinch. First, though, I’ve got to relieve the fuel system pressure, the easiest solution to which would be to pull the fuse for the fuel pump relay, start the engine and idle it until it runs out of gas! I swear that the Chilton manual actually suggests this. I don’t know what else to recommend, so I’ll probably try it.
For some reason I had it in my head that the car’s previous owner replaced the fuel filter, but looking back through my notes and receipts, I don’t see that anywhere. I had previously discounted that part as being the possible cause of my problem, but given that it’s one of the most obvious culprits in this kind of situation, I’d better swap it. A new one is only six bucks, anyway. And if it cures anything, I’ll at least be ahead of the game.
For the moment, though, perhaps I’ll go make myself some hot chocolate and sit around watching The X-Files and thinking about how much having a cold sucks. Nighty-night!
Categorized as Rants