So, yesterday I was going to deliver a laptop I fixed for a friend (some stale drivers were causing it to randomly throw a Blue Screen of Death when starting up), but my brother was busy at Hispanic Teleservices. Apart from that, my dad hired some haulers to move all the stuff we had at the bakery towards the garage, and since they had no ******** clue on how to return to the city, I had to show them the way. Since my brother was arriving until 9:30 PM, my dad told me to bring the Civic.

After stopping at the mall downhill and giving my friend his laptop, I went towards the Civic like any other day, turned the ignition like I always do... but the car was dead. sad I popped the hood open, checked the battery, cleaned the contacts and tightened them, but the car was still deader than dead. crying

I finally got some help from this guy on my side, who gave me a little bit of current to start the engine, then I drove home. Once I got there, my dad told me not to stop the engine, because we were gonna drive my sister to the opposite side of town, towards her friend's house. That was when we realized that the car was running with just the alternator alone: the headlights were ******** flickering even with everything else turned off! gonk

Then, only 50 meters away from my sister's friend's home... the car died once again, on the opposite side of the town, in the middle of the traffic. xp gonk crying

After stopping a cab and asking for some battery power (and I had to persuade him because he claimed his microcontroller would get fried if we did it), we managed to start the car once again. sweatdrop We then rolled all the way home in second gear to keep the engine revved up and prevent it from stopping. Once we got there, we stopped the engine once and for all, and my dad then removed the battery. It was time to have it checked.

Then, today, after getting the CR-V and going for the laptop from which I'm posting right now and picking up my sister (who took a bus towards the computer shop), we went to a photo dealer near downtown. When we got there, it turned that my sister was so ******** ravenous she actually puked inside the car! (and mind you, that's not the first time my sister hurled inside the car, the last one was because she had a party and when I picked her up she was ******** drunk, worse than shitfaced!) Therefore, my dad went inside to buy that stuff as fast as possible... leaving the CR-V's headlights on. When he returned, the battery was dead too. emo

It wasn't until we reached a car battery dealer when we found the reason behind all this: even though our cars are rather new (the CR-V is 2004 and the Civic is 2005), they've been rolling on them so much the batteries were already busted! It didn't matter if we pushed 100 miliamperes or 80 gigaamperes into these batteries: they were deader than deader than dead. crying

The solution? We had to replace the batteries with new ones, and we had to pay $140 for that. talk2hand

Mind you, this wasn't the first time I had to deal with dead batteries. My Sunfire already had a couple of them: first the battery was dead, then the electrode was so rusted it almost dissolved. These two things happened at my home though; what I'm telling you is stuff that left us stranded in the middle of the ******** asphalt jungle! gonk