Christmas…

I have a few minutes this morning, and I thought I would attempt to blog. Since we are down to single-digit sleeps before Christmas, a Christmas theme seemed appropriate. So here goes.

Yesterday, I locked the keys in my car. My car is an older 2012 Equinox. One key fob has a broken key, and the remote doesn’t work on the other, so they have been linked together on one key ring. It seems like a practical solution, and the car is hardly worth the hundred bucks to get a new key.

The keys are in plain sight right there on the console where I left them. I don’t know how the doors got locked. I must have hit the door button with the bag of overpriced groceries I got at the end of the last fateful journey I made. At least I got all the groceries out of the car before I secured it for several days.

Have you ever used Google and YouTube to solve your problem(s)? We have lots of tools. I wanted to jump to the last chapter and use the plasma cutter to remove one of the car doors. That new gorilla tape would likely hold the door back on, and we would just remove it from use. We tried many methods and devices. All of the procedures involve prying the top of the door open enough to slip in some sort of rod to reach in and grab or hit something to unlock the door.

My son suggested that we use gorilla tape to stick to the window and pull the window down. This seemed to have some success on YouTube. We used about $10 worth of tape and found the windows were quite secure and failed to budge even a little bit. Gorilla tape is quite easy to use and sticks very well. The fact that it sticks very well became an issue when we tried to remove it. I decided to leave it on as we were unsure if the car could ever be used again.

It used to be that you would use a slim Jim to slide down into the door, snag some rod or cable, and pop those buttons up. My dad had many of those items in his human stupidity repair kit. Newer cars have all these electrical things, so brute force is not going to work, at least initially. After watching 30 or 40 YouTube videos, the consensus was that grabbing and pulling the inside door handle would resolve all our problems, or at least open up the vehicle. Easier said than done. Only a thin shape would fit through the space created by prying the top of the door. I thought of the backhoe but thought it would likely leave scratches that would not buff out easily.

We had to reach in, hook the door handle, and pry it open. The first rod was just too short. The first attempt got close to the door handle and then dropped into the car with the keys. I walked by the backhoe on the way to find a new tool. Then I found it. The moment was like the scene from Christmas vacation when Clark finds the family tree. There were blazing and glowing lights surrounding the new tool. I later discovered it was just Crystal’s Clark Griwoldesque lighting extravaganza. This tool had promise. In the right hands, it could be molded into the perfect tool for the task. It turns out the Wright hands were not the right hands for this task.

After about an hour of farting around with this perfect tool, I flicked it in anger, and the locks were released. None of the videos mentioned that the horn would start its incessant honking, alerting everyone within miles.

Now I have to watch YouTube videos on how to eliminate the wind whistling around the offending door.