Thursday, December 13, 2007

Silence No More

I never realized how much my car stereo means to me until it stopped working. My 40 mile commute is usually filled with a combination of news radio, KROQ, CDs, and Japanese lessons. For the last week my radio has been dead. The awkward silence of the road, combined with the awareness of many disturbing car sounds that are usually masked by the stereo make my drive long and uneasy.

I attempted to fix it over the weekend. Both fuses looked fine and taking the dashboard out revealed nothing but a bunch of wires. When I started the car back up, the radio worked fine! I turned the car on and off a couple of times with no problems. 10 minutes later I drove to the mall and the radio was dead the whole way.

Last night I had a brilliant idea (thanks to my lovely wife) to switch out the fuse. She said since I was able to get it working for a while when I was moving things around, the fuse was probably bad even though it didn't look blown. Lo and behold, a new fuse and 30 seconds later I had a fully functioning stereo again.

This morning I rocked out to Prince and learned how to say "I don't want to eat now, I want to eat later," in Japanese...and that strange grinding sound seemed to vanish.

4 comments:

Fortune said...

I never drive with the radio on. I hate the idea of big brother Clear Channel piping their subliminal message advertising into my car. Last time I listened to the radio I'm not sure what happened but I know that before I knew it, I was at the Justin Timberlake concert ... that ever happen to you Chipmunk?

Captain Chipmunk said...

Justin wasn't the radio's fault, it was my wife's, plus it was a smokin' show.

I ban all Clear Channel stations when I can, plus I usually listen to CD's or the MP3 player. Except for some Kevin & Bean some mornings and KNX for the traffic on the 5's.

Anne Knowles said...

I heard it on NPR.

Ghetto Photo Girl said...

I'm so glad you married a smart woman.