Car Class: A Waste of Money (But Not Like the Pottery Class)
Two days ago, my left turn signal began to have seizures.
Had it just been me, I would have assumed this was due to another quirky Made-in-Mexico factor, similar to Chris’s descriptions of his leased VW shooting off plastic parts when he pushed the radio controls. But due to the rising gas prices, Chris had been taking my diesel Jetta to work (40 mpg) and I had been left with Big Blue (“If you ate less for breakfast, I could get 20 miles per gallon!”) for my vastly shorter commute.
The left turn signal clicked and blinked at about double the speed of the regular signal, and Chris complained so much about how annoying it was that I finally looked it up in my car manual.
My car manual said, “If a turn signal fails, the indicator light flashes about twice as fast as usual.”
At the time we discovered this, Chris and I were about to go into Russo’s to buy some produce. After we parked the car, he stayed inside and started signaling while I ran outside to look at the lights.
“Everything’s working fine here,” I yelled from the back of the car.
I ran to the front of the car. The sun was bright, and I couldn’t see if anything was happening.
“Are you blinking the signal?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t see anything. Blink the right one so I can compare,” I said.
I went around to the right side of the car. Nothing seemed to be happening there, either.
“I still don’t see anything,” I said.
Chris came out of the car. I thought he was going to check out the light situation, but it turned out that he’d merely gotten bored of sitting in the car and watching my incompetency.
Later that night, Chris figured out which light was broken. He didn’t bother asking me to help him locate the problem, and just jumped in and out of the car as necessary. This would probably explain how he was able to diagnose the car in less than five minutes.
When he came back into the house, he said, “The driver’s side light is out.”
“Maybe you better show me,” I said.
He carefully pointed it out–the top little bulb on the driver’s side, to the left of the main bulb. It seemed pretty clear to me.
Buying and replacing the bulb was my job, since this was my car and since I’d taken The Class, so I went to Autozone a few days later. It never occurred to me to call the dealership, because first, I had taken a car class at Brookline Adult Education about a year ago. Although it wasn’t a hands-on class, out of everything we’d covered, I felt replacing a lightbulb was bound to be one of the easier lessons.
Second, when I’d gone to get my annual inspection at the dealership, they’d replaced a broken brake light without asking me if I wanted them to do it, and they’d charged me about two dollars for the bulb and twenty-five for the “labor.”
Autozone was empty when I went into the store. The lightbulb aisle was near the entrance, and conveniently, there was a lightbulb parts guide on the counter below the bulbs. I looked up my car: 2002 VW Jetta.
I followed the grid across: standard headlight, fog light, directional (front), directional (rear)…
Wait a minute. Was my headlight out, or the directional? Everything had seemed so clear at home, but I was pretty sure I’d sound stupid if I went to ask someone for help and told them, “My front left top light is broken.”
I went outside and turned on my directionals, and ran around to the front of the car. Okay. No blinking yellow light; my directional (front) was broken.
I went back inside. The number of the bulb listed under directional (front) was not on any lightbulb packages I could see. I checked twice, then decided to ask for help.
There was still no one in the store, and two employees were talking to each other at the counter. I walked up and waited. A supervisor, based on his differently-colored shirt, also came up and started talking to one of the employees. The second employee, standing less than a foot away from me, carefully avoided my stare and then drifted away from me slowly.
Okay, so he didn’t want to help me.
I went over to the supervisor and the second employee. Surely someone would ask if I needed help. No one did, so finally I interrupted. And by interrupted, I don’t mean I waited for a natural pause in the conversation before I politely said, “Excuse me,” I mean that I started talking while they were still talking. I had never been so rude before, but then again, I’d never been not asked if I needed help when THERE WERE NO OTHER CUSTOMERS AROUND. What kind of society were we becoming when pointed lingering around the counter didn’t get you immediate assistance?
Apparently I was interrupting an important transaction, in which the employee was withdrawing cash using his debit card. I cared not for his debit transaction, and just said, “I can’t seem to find the lightbulb listed in this guide for my car. Could you help me find it?”
The employee said, “We probably don’t carry it then.”
I thought at first he was going to walk off without trying to help me further but the supervisor was still standing nearby and pretending to look interested in what we were talking about, so the employee went to a computer and looked up the part.
“You need bulb 3357,” he said.
“Is there any reason the book lists a different lightbulb number?” I asked.
He paused.
“Well,” he said finally, “let me put it this way. The people who put that book together, well, those people are stupid.”
Okay, then.
I located my bulb, paid, and went home.
In the garage, with various chihuahuas frolicking about my feet, I examined my car. It looked pretty easy. Surely you just unscrewed the screws by the big lightbulb picture, then you just lifted off the –
Okay, so maybe the cover wasn’t going to just lift off. There were parts of the car preventing the cover from coming off, so I tried unscrewing more screws. That did nothing, so I checked my manual.
Replacing bulbs, replacing bulbs–ah! Here it was, see booklet 3-2. I dutifully turned to booklet 3-2 and searched the table of contents. Replacing bulbs, page 80. I turned to page 80.
“It is becoming increasingly more and more difficult to replace vehicle light bulbs…” I read. Yeah, no kidding.
“In many cases,” I read, “other parts of the car must first be removed before you are able to get to the bulb. This applies especially to the light bulbs in the front of your car which you can only reach through the engine compartment.”
Okay, fine, just tell me how to do it. I read on.
“For your safety, we recommend that you have your authorized VOLKSWAGEN dealer replace any bulbs for you.” The manual continued on, but only about Emergency Starting.
That was it? THAT WAS IT? A two-inch user’s guide that had to be kicked and shoved into the glove compartment, and that was all they had to say about changing light bulbs?
Chris wasn’t home, so I had to go to the next best thing: the Internet.
After much searching, I finally found a useful site that explained how to replace the headlight bulb. Apparently I did need to remove all sorts of parts to get to the driver’s side bulb.
First came the big cover with the picture of the light bulb on it. I used a Phillips screwdriver to remove the screws, and lifted the whole casing off.
Then I removed the battery cover. Yes, the battery cover. The space I had to work with was pretty tight, and as one Internet user groused, only his eleven-year-old daughter’s hands had fit.
The battery was located directly behind the lightbulb area on the driver’s side. From The Class, I had learned that my battery cover could only be removed by pushing down simultaneously on two buttons located on either side of the case. Luckily, I had never tightly closed the case after The Class, and so I had an easy time removing it.
Now I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The directions I’d found on the Internet were for replacing the large main bulb, but it didn’t look like my directional bulb would be located in that same casing.
I could see a black case area to the left of the main bulb, which seemed to directly correspond to the directional bulb. Moreover, it had a tab at the top so it must have been meant to be removed.
I tried pushing down on the tab. Then I pulled at the tab, then I pushed in on the tab. Then I swore at the tab, and neither the tab nor I were happy.
I went inside the house and emailed Chris.
“I think we need Art for this,” I typed.
“Nah, I’m pretty good at mechanical stuff,” Chris wrote back.
“This is kind of hard. I had to take apart a bunch of other pieces to get this far. Art won’t know how to do this either, but at least he’ll pretend that he does until it’s fixed,” I said.
I went back outside. I tapped on the tabbed cover. It fell off. Hmm. I guess I had loosened it.
Now I could actually see the lightbulb I wanted to replace. I wiggled the bulb until I got it out, and then I replaced it. (This was not as easy as it sounded, because at one point, I really needed three hands. And as much as the dogs were willing, paws were not the same as hands.)
I replaced all the covers and tested the directionals. The signal was now clicking and beeping at a regular rate and the yellow directional in front was blinking steadily. Take that, useless manual!
Sure, it had taken an hour. But the bulb had only cost $5, and I was cheap labor.
Posted by: Supersonic Jane | October 18, 2005 | 5:00 pm
Posted in: This Life