Car Troubles

I realized why I haven’t updated in a while – since my laptop last crashed, I hadn’t bothered to reinstall the Semagic LiveJournal client. And since I hate the web-based client, that meant that I never posted any updates. Sorry about that!

So yesterday Josh and I were at Price Chopper in Troy about to head back to my apartment. As I was pulling out of their parking lot, my car lost power and just died right there in the middle of the little side street. It has been idling weird since I got back from Ohio a few days ago, but I didn’t really think much of it. We pushed it back into the parking lot and tried to start it up again. It would turn over, run for a few seconds, putter and then die. It sounded like I was out of gas, but the gas guage said I had slightly more than a quarter of a tank. There is an Autozone in the Price Chopper plaza, so we stopped in there and asked what they thought. One of the guys came out and listened, and he said the same thing, that it sounded like somehow the car wasn’t getting enough gas.

Interestingly enough, someone from RPI’s Public Safety (the campus police force) was doing some personal shopping at Price Chopper at the same time, so we hitched a ride back to RPI. The person asked not to be identified, but was really cool! They also asked us not to tell anyone they were at Price Chopper shopping while in uniform, on duty, and driving a Public Safety car The funny thing is that only an hour before at Wal-Mart we saw another Public Safety person buying some donuts, driving a different Public Safety vehicle. So if something was going down yesterday at RPI, might as well radio up to Brunswick to find everyone

So we rode in the back seat of this Public Safety car (which is needlessly exactly like a police car) all the way back to RPI to pick up Josh’s car. Then we drove back to Price Chopper so we could try to figure out what to do with my car. Apparently letting it sit for a while was good for it, because I was able to get it started, and as long as it didn’t idle for too long it didn’t die. So I rev’ed it up, and got up enough momentum to roll down the hill toward the Mobil station (which has a garage).

I put some gas in it to see if that might be the problem. Actually it did run a bit better when it had more gas in it. I’m wondering if I got ahold of some bad gas somewhere. Anyone ever had that happen? Does that happen in the US? It still wasn’t quite running right, and of course by the time I got there (about 7 PM) the garage was closed, so I pulled it into a parking spot and handed the keys over to the gas station attendent there. This morning I called the garage and they will take a look at the car early this afternoon and call me back.

Since a car is really just a big computer, and since I understand computers fairly well, I really wish that they distributed those diagnostic computers with the car when you buy it so that you could make the initial diagnosis yourself. I honestly think cars are smart, and I have faith that most people have at least some intelligence, so together they should be able to work together to figure out what’s going on!