I get it now

My car is quirky. Old and quirky. The doors lock and unlock themselves at random times. I have to stretch into the backseats to lock the back doors because the remote on my keyring only locks the front. The driver's side sun visor fell off, making afternoon driving an adventure. There is a constantly flashing red light on the dashboard which indicates that my airbags won't deploy. I keep meaning to put a sticker over it because it gets hypnotically annoying after awhile. The cassette tape adapter for my ipod has to be ejected and popped back into the deck at least a dozen times before it will play music.

That brings me to another big quirk: heating and air-conditioning. I've got them, which is great. Everything turns on without a problem. I've got full controls for both the front and rear of the car. What DOESN'T happen automatically, though, is the heating or air-conditioning turning off whenever the car is turned off. If I forget to hit all of the 'off' buttons, as I did this past Friday, the air-conditioner continues to run until the battery dies, which I discovered this morning as I headed out to run some errands.

Fortunately, I called the auto club, who had someone out quickly to jump start the battery. Unfortunately, I turned the car off after they left because I forgot to do a couple of things in the house. I now know that I should've driven the car around so that the battery could get charged up, but that doesn't help the embarassment I'm going to feel when I call the auto club back.