wet

[jazzfish]

Petals Around the Rose, an induction game. (If you Get It, for heaven's sake don't spoil it for everyone else! Much more fun to gloat!)

It started pouring around, oh, quarter of seven last night. I walked out of K's apartment at around 7:15, intending to get in Glyndwr (which I'd left there that morning to catch the bus in to class, since the Parking Nazis have started cracking down on the large lot close to campus and the Syncad lot is full more often than not), pick up a McBurger for dinner, and head to Kyle's Werewolf game, which starts at 7:30. Opened the car door. "That's funny, the interior light isn't coming on-- FUCK." Click. Click. Yep, battery's dead, due to the halflight this morning, the ongoing lack of a light dinger in Glyndwr[1], and my own forgetfulness. Rain keeps pouring down.

Called K out and begged for a jumpstart. After some effort we managed to roll Glyndwr into a position where Magikel can get nose-to-nose with it. Popped the hoods. I stared in numb, wet surprise at the interior of Magikel. The VW designers covered all the dangerous possibly exposed bits with plastic covers. You know, to protect them in case you did something hazardous like open the hood to get at them. Rain keeps pouring down.

We went back inside, and she hunted up a flashlight while I called Kyle and told him I'd be late. Then back outside, to try and find the battery in Magikel. "The manual says it's under the plastic cover on the left side." We looked briefly at the left side of the engine. No plastic covers. "Um, by 'left' do they maybe mean 'right?'" They sure did. Clearly when VW engineers try to look under the hood of a beetle they do it from the driver's seat, or maybe on the windshield. Rain keeps pouring down. I looked down and realised that we were standing ankle-deep in water. My latent self-preservation instinct kicked in at this point and we chose not to continue playing with electricity. I rolled Glyndwr back into the parking spot and K gave me a ride to Kyle's, from whence I got a lift home with Toh after the game.

Stupid car. Stupid rain.

---

[1]The Mazda dealership will charge me about $70 to look at Glyndwr and determine whether or not they can fix the light dinger; it's unclear whether the $70 includes the cost of actually fixing it. Regardless, that's not cash I've got on hand at the moment. Maybe after the New Year.

Comments

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Well, sides of a car are generally referred to relative to vehicle's direction of travel.. making driver's side "left". :)

[nixve.livejournal.com]

But if you're opening the hood, can't they say "the battery is on the right side of the engine compartment" instead of continuing to call it the left ?

Not that it was a huge issue but considering how user-friendly the rest of my car is I'm surprised the various plastic covers to all the bits under the hood weren't color coded or had pictures painted on them for identification or something.

[narquelion.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking VWs are sort of like Macs. And Macs, we determined in high school, are not user-friendly so much as they are user-happy.

I mean, does it help the not-bootingness of my suitmate Sarah's Mac to see a little frowny-Mac-face on the screen? No. Does it make me feel particularly befriended? Not really. Do I laugh? You betcha.

See the one button mouse vs. two button mouse debate. The absence of extra mouse buttons is not really about friendship. Obviously, when most people have five fingers per hand, using two of them, not even at the same time, is not excessively confusing. (If anything, holding down a key with the other hand while clicking mouse with the first is more so.) It's about making me laugh. No, I mean it's about Mac user-happy holistic design philosophy. Well, maybe both.

In sum, your VW should have happy faces and flowers on the plastic covers. I mean, what are you doing under the hood anyway, it should just work, right?

[zerblinitzky.livejournal.com]

I think what you're trying to say is that there's a difference between a easily used and an easily learned interface. I find Unix extremely easy to use, but it took me years to learn it. I learned how to talk to my Mac in about half an hour, but some things can take longer on it than on a Linux machine, simply because it's more graphical, cutesy, and less keyboard-intensive.
The frowny face on boot failure is immediately obvious: "I was happy the last dozen times you turned me on, but now I am sad and broken. Take me to someone who knows how to fix me". It's not much of a help for determining what went wrong, of course, but you do know what the result is.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Makes more sense to keep it consistent--though they could say "driver's side" or "passenger side" to remove confusion; or, as you said, mark it. I was impressed (not sure if favorably or unfavorably) by how much was covered by plastic in the engine compartment of one VW (Jetta?) I looked at..