I believe in Hell. With the capital H. It is a place where the innocent must deal with the evil creations of automotive engineers. This subset/splinter faction of the engineering profession has the mission of placing as many impossibly small tabs, clips, bolts and retaining rings in the most unreachable, unseeable and unwrenchable places possible, and creating a gauntlet of steel and plastic torment for all those whose life choices brought them to this desolate and cramped Forum of Absolute Suffering. The most comfortable truck repair yoga pose for me was on my back in the driver's side footwell with my feet in the door pocket.
Perhaps I'm overdramatizing, and thank god Orris saved me from creating a practice fire for the Matinicus volunteer fire crew, or going all Jack Nicholson and putting my splitting maul first through the windshield and then through every other surface on my once beloved Silverado 2500 HD. I don't golf, so the maul would be the next best thing. Better really.
The actual problem presented when Megan went to move the truck in order to mow the lawn. The shift lever was flopping about in all positions at once, none of which would result in the vehicle moving off that patch of lawn.
After my routine assessment of everything I've done wrong in life which brought me to this place, and my usual self-blame for simple mechanical failures, I ordered a new shifter cable from NAPA. Henry, my mechanically gifted nephew, was coming out the next weekend and agreed to install it.
The report back from Henry was encouraging with one exception, which is that he didn't get the new cable properly entwined around Satan's own support bracket, resulting in the new cable breaking apart when he shifted into drive. 'Support bracket' is a little misleading in that this is a sturdy metal silly-straw-shaped contrivance bolted to the upper and inner surface of the steering column in a place one cannot see or reach into. The DIY videos mostly skip this part because it does not cause people to like and subscribe.
After a good bit of diligent procrastination, I ordered a second cable from NAPA and watched videos, including Henry's where he stuck his phone into the upper under-dash orifice to conveniently identify the proper routing of the cable through Lucifer' silly straw.
I started fresh around 7 a.m. and promised if I wasn't making progress by 9, I'd just find something else to do. Aside from the really hard parts, almost every step of the process of removing the broken cable and installing the new new one showed me the malevolent face of pure evil from automotive engineers. Each fixture presented a fresh set of tests of my fingers and my sanity and my ability to be upside down for lengthy periods with flakes of rust falling into my mouth while I was trying to utter long strings of profanities.
The cable comes in an upper and lower segment and there are no re-do's when connecting them. Once joined, three bishops and a cardinal could not annul the union.
And so I pushed the halves together. Pretty much. By pretty much I mean I couldn't get them apart, but things did not look right. There was much fiddling with plastic locking collars and other elegant horrors created by said engineers. When I thought I had things connected, I tried to start the truck with no luck. I assumed the battery was dead from sitting for 2 months, which would prove incorrect.
For whatever reason, the automotive engineers also had great concern about 35 pound truck batteries floating up out of their snug sockets, and so placed a retaining bolt in a place requiring a very long socket wrench extender. Thankfully, this is where I called Orris for such an extension.
He and I wrestled, jumped and used a battery booster go-go box thing to try to start the truck with no luck.
Then he took a look at the not perfect union between the upper and lower parts of the cable and suggested disconnecting the cable at the steering column end. With that piece of mechanical insight and a good bit of shoving and growling, the ends and all the elegant plastic horror pieces went together properly, at which point the truck shifted into park and started right up.
I like to find meaning in these struggles and I suppose this time it is the collective wisdom of Henry, Orris and I against the dark forces of automotive engineering.
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