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 |  My collected entries for the 2024 edition of Wonderland. |
| PROMPT ▼ A few months ago, my wife and I bought a new car to replace my old Camry which was in need of more repairs than we were willing to put into it. We ended up getting a minivan (which surprised us both because we swore we'd never be "minivan" people... and then we had kids  ), and the day we brought it home from the dealership, my wife pulls it into the garage. She parks, gets out, and closes the doors before realizing that she left the new key fobs on the center console. And the doors automatically locked.We would find out later that the reason the doors automatically locked is because both key fobs had nearly dead batteries, so the car did not detect them inside the vehicle when my wife got out. And it's apparently fairly common for both key fobs to run out of battery; the two things that run a fob battery down more than anything are being in close proximity to each other, and close proximity to the car itself (because when that happens, they continue to transmit a signal back and forth at all times), which is how many dealerships often store the keys to the cars... together and/or in that little lockbox attached to the window. Anyway, we called AAA and had them come out to open the vehicle. In the course of getting the doors open, they set off the car alarm (because they had to pry the door away from the frame to get the door device inside). But it was quick and a few moments later I had the keys in hand. After replacing the batteries, I went to start the car to make sure the fobs worked, and the car's electronics turned on but the engine wouldn't turn over. I spent over an hour trying to figure out if it was some setting on the new car that I just hadn't figured out yet. I ended up calling the dealership and told them the situation. They said, "Oh, it seems we accidentally forgot to disable the dealership's anti-theft system. When you set off the car alarm it locked down the vehicle's start function as a security precaution. We're going to need to send someone out to disable it from the vehicle itself." This is probably where I should mention that this was all occurring late in the afternoon (after spending all morning at the dealership), and since my wife still wasn't used to the dimensions of the new (larger) minivan, she hadn't quite pulled the van all the way into the garage. We had a minivan that wouldn't start, with a back end sticking out of the garage so we couldn't even close the garage door. And since the security system had disabled the engine, I couldn't even shift it into neutral to push it the rest of the way into the garage. The dealership did manage to send someone out that evening to disable the security system and we got everything working again, but that was a quite frustrating first day experience with our family's new minivan. ______________________________ (520 words) |
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