ya gotta love ‘em.
My daughter once called me from forty minutes away and said the car had died and she and her buddy needed me to come pick them up. On the way home, I asked her how the car had died.
"It just quit," she said.
"Were there any lights on on the dashboard?"
"No."
"How did it quit? Did it die suddenly? Did it cough and choke and wheeze and finally just not catch again? Did you gradually lose power until you realized the engine was dead? What happened?"
"No, it pretty much just quit," she insisted.
"Were there any flickers that you noticed from the dashboard lights while it was in the process of quitting?"
"Nope," she said again.
"Hmm," I said, thinking. "How about before it died? Were there any strange sounds or smells that you noticed, or anything unusual you felt?"
"No, nothing like that," she said.
"And you're sure there were no lights on on the dashboard?"
"I told you, there were no lights on! Except the TEMP light, of course, but that's only because there wasn't any water in the radiator."
I was stunned almost speechless. "...because there...What??!"
She sighed with obvious exasperation at having to explain something so elementary. She spoke with exaggerated slowness and precision: "Be-cause there was-n't an-y wat-er in the ra-di-a-tor. It all ran out on the driveway when I first started the car!"
"You knew this, and you drove the car anyway?"
Another exasperated sigh. "I was only going to the movies with Rachel!"
And so on. Ah, well--it was her car, not mine. Trouble is, it's a 1979 Pontiac Firebird in pretty nice condition with a 5.7L V-8. At least one of the heads was warped, and the car hasn't run since then.