marcicat | I may regret this.

Last week I remembered that my car came with a remote car starter. (It’s been all-caps cold, and one of my coworkers was saying he ranked his remote starter as an essential car feature, and I was all, ‘wait… don’t I have one of those?’)

And I’ve always had this aversion to it, probably because I didn’t really understand what the seller was telling me when he explained it (it’s possible he didn’t either; it was not his car), and because no one else in my family had one, so it wasn’t like I could ask them.

But I found it, and I replaced the battery, and it beeped at me, but it’s not like it came with an instruction manual, and the internet has been surprisingly unhelpful when it came to directions. So today I set off my car alarm (twice) and then had the distinctly unsettling and yet somehow cool experience of sitting in my car, pushing a button, and having the engine start.

“Holy shit,” I said. (Out loud, but I was in the privacy of my car in a pretty empty parking lot, so it doesn’t count as much.) “It works.” (Also out loud.)

Then, of course, I had to figure out the tricky follow-up question: Once one has started a car with no key in the ignition, how does one turn it off again? (Answer: hit the brakes.)

And the abiding mysteries: What about when you want to drive somewhere? Can you put a key in the ignition and turn it while the car is already running? Which of the two keys is the one that’s supposed to stay in the car to make this device work? What is a valet button, and does my car have one? If I am actually remote when I remote start it, will it shut off when I open the door? (Apparently this is a safety feature? It seems counter-productive, but I have not tested it.)

WHAT AN ADVENTURE THIS WEEK IS GOING TO BE!

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.