Sometimes You Do Get Lucky

A simple story is sometimes the best story, with this story starting out on a wretchedly cold winter day. About ten below zero.

The car wouldn’t start. How simple is that? How common is that bond with the rest of humanity?

Anyway, a jump from my wife’s Accord to my eighteen-year old Civic got the latter going, needing the jump, though, a puzzle since the battery was only a little over three years old.

Got the car to the dealer and said what I usually say, “Keep it until it’s fixed.” I drive the car so little, and that mostly around town, that several times a week I have to take it out onto a highway just to keep it lubed and the battery charged.

“Bad battery,” he told me the next day.

“Okay,” I said. “How much will this cost?”

“A hundred and forty-nine dollars,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Put it in.”

When I went to pick it up, though, the question popped into my mind for no good reason at all. It wasn’t even something I’d been thinking about.

“What’s the warranty?” I asked.

“A hundred months,” he said.

“What about the bad battery?” I asked. “It wasn’t all that old.”

“Let me check,” he said.

This checking actually took about twenty minutes and I really didn’t expect anything good to come of it.

But then he said, “Honda changed all their batteries to one-hundred months on November first, 2004.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You bought your battery on November second, 2004.”

The result of that was a pro-rated credit of $27.50. Sometimes you do get lucky.