But it has idiot lights . . .

So I'm on vacation this week, 'cause my birfday falls in here, and just doing stuff around the house, I'm not driving my car all that much. Get ready to go grocery shopping last night around 5:00, jump in hit the starter . . . and it's like Scotty beamed the engine out of the car in mid-crank.

Nothing. No dash readout, no nav system booting up, no interior lights. Spooky. I give it about 5 minutes and try again. Won't even crank and stuff is flickering and acting goofy. Perfect, I'm thinking, breaks down right when the weekend starts, how am I going to get it running to get back to work on Monday?

I contemplated towing it to a garage or calling one of those hideously expensive, We'll come to your place car repair guys. Problem is with these new cars, so over-engineered, it's difficult for us shade tree mechanic types to do much work on them. But I give it a go.

Pull all the little fuses out, check 'em, clean the contacts and put them back in. Nothing. By the time I went to bed, even the remote locking system wouldn't work. I decided it might be the battery. So this morning I got up and pulled it out.

And walked to the auto parts store. Yeah, carrying a battery. You know what? Those things are freakin' heavy. And I've got partial nerve damage in my right hand, so it's hard to hang onto stuff.

Long story short, too late, it turns out that the battery is dead. So here's my thing -- why wasn't there a warning in all that hi-tech readout stuff on my dash?

I mean, it tells me if my washer fluid is low for f*ck's sake! And it can't mention that the battery isn't holding a charge? The car is only 5 years old, that's the last thing, as you can see, that I thought a problem like this would be. And this is why I like full instrumentation. Give me dash full of gauges, I like that. Oil pressure, oil temp, water temp, ammeter, voltmeter, etc. Let me make my decisions on what's going on by evaluating the info.

Guess I'm sort of old fashioned. I'm just not a fan of the car driving itself. *sigh* Sucks getting old.