What a Coincidence!

Yesterday I took the car to the dealer to get many things done: a recall fix, regular maintenance, "full detailing" so we could have that fresh new car smell again, and to get the Acura iPod adapter installed so we could finally have iPod joy. There are these radio transmitter things you can use with your iPod, but it doesn't take much of a signal from real radio stations to cause annoying sound degradation from interference, and driving around New York only a couple of frequencies are totally empty, and even that changes after half an hour of driving. Maybe $250 is too much, but it hides in the glove box easily and the 1-6 buttons on the control panel start playlists as well, so it seemed like a win.

When I got to the dealer, not only was it exactly 8:00 AM, but the odometer was reading at exactly 15,000 miles! I seriously considered buying a lottery ticket with 10,20,30,40,50,60 as my picks, but apparently the lotto only goes up to 56, so that plan was foiled. Anyway, back at the office, I got a call from the Acura people telling me the iPod adapter was $450, and was I okay with it? I thought that was a lot more than the $250 I had thought it was going to be going in, but I sucked it up anyway.

Things were still going dandy when I picked up the car the next day. I noticed the iPod adapter turned out to be a big white cable poking randomly out of the dashboard in an unsightly way, not in the glovebox as assumed, but my spirits were still high as I drove the car out of the garage there, only to notice that the windshield wipers were stuck maybe 5 inches above "home base". Of course, one simply turns on the wipers for one cycle and they return back to home base, except in my case, they stopped 5 inches above home base. After a brief trip around the block battling rush hour traffic, I made it back to the dealer, where the guy who had given me the car allowed as to how he "just worked there" and if I had a problem with the wipers I needed to talk to a "service representative". Said representative, after a couple of tries, agreed to have a mechanic come down and fix the wipers. Or rather, she'd call a mechanic to have one come down. Or rather, she'd call a mechanic after she'd dealt with another customer. Unfortunately, all the mechanics had gone home already! It was most odd, on most days, you see, there's usually one or two hanging around doing a little overtime, but today they had taken off, but I could come by tomorrow and they'd fix me right up.

Meanwhile, I also asked how I was to use the iPod adapter as none of the radio controls on the car seemed to know about it. The answer, of course, was to tune the radio to FM 88.1. So evidently the whole playlist with the 1-6 buttons was a bit of a pipe dream; over-optimistic on my part to be sure. But still, with a direct connection to the radio one presumes there would be no problem overriding whatever latent weak signals were out in the world on 88.1. One would be wrong, however. In fact, one ends up spending 11x as much money on something uglier and with approximately the same sound quality as this. However, let us be totally fair, call a spade a spade, and give credit where it is due: the adapter does charge the iPod when it is plugged in.