I love a car with character

Today, wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, my windshield-wiper problem was fixed. For those of you familiar with my 'sweet ride' (a '96 Geo Prism I affectionately call "The Jade Bullet" or Jade for short) you know I've been dealing with this unfortunate issue for...well for years, actually. The wipers turned on just fine. They sprung into action with remarkable alacrity, beating back & forth in regular tempo, attuned to the very beating of my heart.

Ahem.

Alas, despite their evident usefulness and eagerness the wipers refused to turn off. It was like having a guest in the house whom you love dearly but who has stayed for weeks & weeks and has eaten all of your peanut butter. Yes. Indeed, it was like that. For behold, the wipers would wipe all of those pesky raindrops from the windshield (i.e. do their job) but then continued to wipe and wipe and wipe and wipe long after the last drop had disappeared from the glass, and the sound of rubber grating on dry windshield is not a pleasant noise, especially when extended for miles & miles & miles.

I'd have to turn the dang car OFF in order to get the stupid things to stop swiping, and even then if I turned the car off when the wipers were in any position but the just-barely-hit-the-bottom-of-their-sweep-and-were-immediately-about-to-start-upward-again position, the wipers would continue their inevitable course over the surface of my windshield when I turned the car on again.

It was fun.

Oh, wait. No it wasn't.

But it gave my car character. Oh, how it gave the car character. I could tell fond stories of having to pull off the freeway into an empty parking lot, turn off the car, restart it & pull back onto the freeway, only to have intermittent rain hit AGAIN less than 5 minutes later. And stop again after about a minute.

So today, when I climbed back into my car after (fiiiiinally) getting the wiper switch in the steering wheel replaced, I was glad. And thankful. And many other positive adjectives. I did feel a kind of wistfulness though, reflecting that the days of wiper woes were over, and gone forever were all of the stories I could have garnered if only I'd left the problem unresolved.

Fortunately, on the drive home, while the wipers worked spectacularly, I noticed that my car had suddenly developed another piece of character. The steering wheel is now 90 degrees to the right of where it's supposed to be. So, when I'm driving straight, instead of the wheel being at the 12 o'clock position, it serenely stays at the 3 o'clock position, obscuring my view of the spedometer ("What, officer? Was I really going 75 through that residential zone? I couldn't see my spedometer, you see...") and positioning the airbag so that if I get in a head-on car accident, I can reasonably be assured that my left arm will fare pretty well, and the rest of me will end up halfway inside my radio.

Huzzah.

So, I'll go back to the shop tomorrow, laugh a little at the antics of those silly mechanics, cry a little at the cruelty of the world, and strip yet another piece of character from my beloved Jade.

Poor Jade. I hope she knows I'll still love her all the same.