Menage à Trois Bingo

Yesterday morning I drove to work with no problems, though the traffic was worse than normal due to the incipient snowstorm.

$COMPANY sent us home about 3:00 since the weather had worsened considerably through the day. From the moment I started the car, I noticed that it was acting weird. The revs were all wrong for the gear it was in, it would be very very sluggish and then jerk forward suddenly 10 mph faster, and when I was forced to stop for a traffic jam and sat in neutral for a minute the car shuddered for a few seconds and then stalled.

It felt sort of like trying to drive with the parking brake on, so while I was stopped, I set and unset the brake several times on the theory that maybe it was stuck or frozen. It felt sort of like trying to drive on the last ounce of gas in an empty tank, and there was a faint smell of gasoline--though with the number of cars surrounding me the odor could have been from any one of them.

I called ohari and he suggested that maybe there was ice in the fuel line, so I made my way to an exit and a gas station, put some STP in the tank, and made sure to kick all the visible snow off the bottom of the car for good measure. I crawled home eventually but the symptoms never ceased.

This morning was more of the same. When I described the symptoms to the team, Robert suggested maybe a manifold leak, a gasket wearing out, or an emissions sensor problem. Whatever all that means.

These symptoms are similar to a cluster of issues I had with the car late last summer. After I first noticed them, and because the car was well into its second hundred thousand miles, I had the clutch replaced. We promptly drove it to Alabama, and suffered the same issues the whole way there and most of the way back...after which the problems stopped completely. There have been brief moments when it has come back for an hour or so and then vanished again, but this is back to the worst of it.

Meep. And here we were going to be back on stable financial ground, and even have some extra due to tax refund. Sigh.

I am getting more and more fed up with the fees being charged for everything to do with money. Several of my creditors have the audacity to charge me a fee for PAYING THEM! Ten, twelve, even fifteen bucks for a "convenience fee" when you pay using the automated phone system or online. No human operator involved, I'm doing all the work. If I send a check, which will have to be opened, read, and input by a clerk, there's no fee. They're charging me for the privilege of doing a clerical job that they'd otherwise have to pay someone to do!