So, the headlights on my car suddenly would not go out. When you’d open the driver’s door the car would start beeping insanely at you – and then the lights would stay on for a good half hour before finally turning themselves off. Weird. “The darn thing is possessed” is what I was thinking. I’m looking all over for a short, a bad fuse, or some high-tech car-computer-brain malfunction as to why the lights weren’t working. Normally, I don’t ever have to think about turning them on or turning them off. These new fangled cars work off a sensor that takes care of all that for you. Night-time. Lights on. Daytime. Lights off. Shut off the car – lights off. Everything gets thrown off when these simple things stop working. Have you ever walked up to an automatic door at a store that’s not working? There’s a good chance you walk right into the door instead of opening it yourself. You just expect it to work like it always has.
So, after reading the car manual, checking the Internet, and fussing with different combinations of how I shut off the car and locked the doors to see if maybe doing it in just the right order would make it work again, I visited the car dealership.
The service manager took a look at the car, reached in to the turn signal post on the steering wheel, and turned a knob. “There, he said.”
What?!
“Somebody turned on your headlights manually.”
What?!
“Dumbass.” This part was implied, but I’m sure he was thinking it. All I needed to do was manually turn the lights off again and they would operate on the sensor – just like always.