Humor

When My Car Wouldn’t Start a Friend Had a Silly Plan to Keep it Going

What I ended up doing seemed absolutely ridiculous

The summer before my senior year of high school, I started working at a nearby pocketbook factory to save money for my first car. What I had in mind to buy and what I ended up buying were very different.

According to my calculations, my mother, at her insistence, was holding onto around $1,200 for me, which I believed would be enough to purchase a decent used car back in the 1960s.

When I reminded her I would be needing the money soon, she told me regretfully that she had spent it on paying bills but promised to take out a small loan.

I worked a few months longer as I did not have my license yet so between the new money I saved and the loan, we could still only come up with $700.

The car of my dreams was now out of reach. The search for an affordable car led me to a cute, little used 1957 English Ford, which looked like a smaller replica of an American Ford, with a low horsepower, 4-cylinder engine.

It ran — but not without its issues

While I would not say I had anything but problems with it, it did cause some confusion for mechanics when they looked under the hood and found parts located in unexpected places.

It was my first car and I loved it. It was all black so I painted the rims on the lights light blue to not only enhance its appearance but to make it easier to spot in a parking lot.

Most of the time, my car ran well. But one day, it simply wouldn’t start.

My father opened the hood, looked at it, remarked that everything was backward, and walked away dumbfounded.

A friend, who was a mechanic looked at it and was baffled, too.

That left me with only a small chance of finding someone who would know how to fix it, but I couldn’t drive it anyway, even if I found a repair shop.

There’s more than one way to start a car

However, another friend showed me how to start the car without a key. He demonstrated putting the gears in neutral, pushing it a bit so it starts to roll, jumping into the driver’s seat, and then shifting it into second gear.

Seriously? I’m supposed to push my car and chase it, then hope I jump in before it gets away!

I felt relieved that I had a temporary solution, and I made sure to take careful notes so that I could repeat the steps myself, but is this really the only alternative for me?

Girls don’t do stuff like this! I felt as if this were undignified, embarrassing, and slightly ridiculous.

Nonetheless, I knew this was not a permanent fix, and if I wanted to find a mechanic and get to work on time, I would have to avail myself of small hills to park on, or keep the car running once started.

The task at hand

As I got dressed for work the next morning the reality of what I was about to do hit me. How could I do this wearing a skirt and heels? Women didn’t wear pants to work in those days, just skirts or dresses. This was not going to be easy.

However, since I had no other option, I reluctantly accepted the task and prepared myself to push the car to start it after I finished breakfast.

Undeterred and desperate not to lose my job, after placing my purse on the back seat and shifting the car into neutral, I leaned on the open driver’s side door frame and began pushing the small car.

Surprisingly, it responded easily and started rolling so I gingerly jumped in, shifted it to second gear with my foot on the clutch, and started it.

Yay! I did it.

One other issue — there were no hills in the parking lot at my workplace, so it was necessary to park the car a block away on a slight incline to repeat the process of starting it again at the end of the day.

My ridiculous routine

Looking back, it’s hard to believe this was the only acceptable solution.

Over the next few weeks, I broke several heels off my shoes while chasing after the car. Although I had more mechanics look at it, none seemed to be able to figure out the problem.

One night while pushing my car and chasing it before it got away, someone from my job was watching, which I did not know at the time.

The next day, he was kind enough to scour the building looking for me. He said he knew exactly what I was doing, being a mechanic himself, but was laughing too hard to help me.

He invited me to bring the car into our company’s garage where he could look under the hood.

Once inside the garage, he probed deep into the engine, feeling around the insides and anything else he could get his hands on. After roughly ten minutes, I heard him exclaim, “Ah ha!”

“What? Did you find something?”

“I think I found a loose wire. Try to start it now,” he said triumphantly.

After all that time of struggling with the car, the problem was a wire that was just loose enough to disrupt electrical contact, but not so loose to be immediately noticeable.

I must have thanked him a dozen times and hoped my little routine of chasing my car went unnoticed by other employees.

Curses, foiled again!

Weeks after my car was repaired, I was having a casual conversation in the cafeteria with a woman from another department. During our chat, she jokingly asked if I heard about the lady who works in the building and parks her small black car on the next block, then runs after it.

I hesitated for a moment, realizing my shenanigans had not gone unnoticed and felt my face turn bright red. Finally, I admitted, “Oh, yes, I heard of her. It was me!”

Thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed my story, here is another you may like. To be added to my mailing list, click here. Feel free to reply to any of my stories. Happy reading!