12/30/08 The Demise of the Horn Monster

You’ll be happy to know that the horn monster has been (hopefully) eradicated. I took my car into the dealership and explained the problem. They told me that it would take about 40 minutes to fix, so I just sat in the little poorly-lit waiting room and tried to ignore the out of date copies of People Magazine and reruns of Judge Judy blasting from the TV bolted to the wall. The good news is that they couldn’t claim that there wasn’t anything wrong with my horn because even Her Honor’s bickering with the defendant over who agreed to pay for the plaintiff’s boob job last January couldn’t drown out the uninterrupted horn blaring from the service bay, At least the horn monster was making his presence known.

About thirty minutes AFTER the 40 minutes they promised me, a guy came in to tell me that I needed a new horn pad because “By durn! That other one was really stuck!” The problem, he went on to explain, was that they didn’t have any in stock, so they were sending someone out to get one from another dealership. Not to worry though. It shouldn’t be more than another 30-45 minutes. So I settled back in to wait, and gritted my teeth through a second episode of Judge Judy (for the love of all things holy, please please don’t let it be a Judge Judy marathon!) and the plaintiff whined on about her loser dead-beat boyfriend not paying rent like he promised.

An hour after the second promised 40 minutes had passed, my new part must have arrived, because the horn went off again. The other customers in the waiting room jumped and giggled nervously. Somebody murmured that he hoped that wasn’t his car out there, but I just smiled. It’s actually pretty funny when it isn’t you trying to get the bleeping horn to stop. I could hear several of the mechanics trying to yell over the noise. The horn monster wasn’t going down without a fight.

I was in the middle of ignoring some soap opera drama (at least we were free of Judge Judy and her minions of morons) when the mechanic staggered back into the waiting room. His hair was sticking up in tufts on his head and he was talking louder than necessary (I hope the hearing loss from the horn battle is just temporary) but he did manage to let me know that they had finally been able to defeat the horn monster and return my car to normal (and quiet) working order. He handed me my keys and almost pushed me out the door towards my car, as glad to be rid of me and my horn as I was to escape my little prison cell of daytime television.

Estimated time to fix horn: 40 minutes
Actual time to fix horn: 3 hours and 30 minutes
Number of times Judge Judy scowled and interrupted people to tell them that they were idiots: 42*
Number of decibels of my car horn: 110
Number of times that horn went off while being fixed: 8
Number of times that other people in the waiting room jumped when the horn went off: 8
Number of times that horn has gone off since it was fixed: 0

Let’s hope we’ve heard the last of the horn monster.

*an estimate…like I said, I was trying to tune her out