Stuck

Early last Tuesday morning I was awakened by my roommate after she discovered  that her car battery had died.  I agreed to jump start her car after class and went back to sleep.  Eleven o'clock and done for the day I returned home for a quick jump start and thus the adventure begins.

First of all, my car is designed terribly.  Here's a visual aide:

This is a sideways (don't ask me, ask blogger) picture of my battery with the positive terminal clearly marked.  What is missing?  That's right, the negative terminal.  Against my better hopes, I pulled out the car's instruction manual in hopes of locating the hidden terminal.  I was told that it was "a bolt under the metal part on the driver's side in front of the radiator marked with the letters GND."  Great!  What's a radiator?  After about fifteen minutes of me peering into the depths of the engine compartment, Christina and I switched places and I realized that I had been leaning over the sticker that marked the bolt hidden under a scrap of metal whose only purpose was to hide this bolt the whole time.  Here is a visual of how far away the negative terminal is from the acutal battery:

The positive terminal is the red bit at the top of the picture and the negative is under the discoloration on the bottom edge of the picture.  After we had overcome the poor design of my engine, Christina's car was easily started.

Round two began when she did not have enough time to drive around and let the battery rejuvinate itself and got stuck at Office Depot.  On an errand of my own, I wasn't far away and met her there.  We started her car up again without a fuss and since I had a slightly more fluid schedule I offered to switch vehicles so that it could run like it needed to.  Christina gratefully agreed and we went our seperate ways.

Far from the reaches of campus, I was stopped at a traffic light, about four cars back.  The engine began to sputter and I just knew that Christina's car was going to give out again.  I tried to save it, but there was no hope.  The next step was to locate the hazard lights and turn them on, then put it in park.  Not long after I realized that I couldn't push the gear shift past neutral, I realized that the hazards weren't working.  The battery was that dead.  

Christina was far away, but immediately turned in my direction when I called, then I called my sister to see if there was anything else I could do.  Meanwhile, I was stuck at a traffic light with my foot stuck to the brake, no efficient way to alert people of my troubles, and a gas station so close that I could almost touch it but could not hope to reach it.  A godsend in the form of two guys appeared saying, "We want to push your car into the gas station, is this okay?"  I told them that, yes, indeed, I would allow them to take me out of the middle of the road.  They stopped traffic and pushed me in and were back on the road before I had a chance to say thank you.  Christina fortunately had AAA and was able to sit out the last bit of the day getting the battery replaced.  Now I rejoice when I see that her car has changed spaces since it means that it has left one location and has successfully returned to the apartment.