Falling Apart (now with updates!)

A few months ago, my car started doing this thing where if I drive it for a long distance (say, the hour's drive to my parents' house) it will lose the ability to shift into overdrive. It sounds like it needs to shift gears, it's roaring loud, and won't change. So you just drive what sounds like an angry 18-wheeler for an hour. I took the car in for an oil change and had them look at the problem while they were in there, and they told me I needed a new transmission. I usually only drive my car around town, and it wasn't a problem on short trips so in the end I said "no dice" on the new transmission and pretty much forgot about the problem unless I was on a long trip. So, Thursday I had to drive to Atlanta to pick Tom up from the airport. Long trip. About halfway to Atlanta it starts making the loud overdrive noise. I ignore it. It's fine. I get Tom from the airport, we head back to Birmingham, it makes the noise the entire way home. Fine. The next day we leave to go to breakfast. Short trip. Literally like 1/2 a mile. Car is roaring. Apparently the trip has exacerbated the transmission problem, and the car is incredibly loud no matter what the trip length is, for the duration of the weekend. Whatever though, I don't care. So yesterday, I had to take Tom back to Atlanta to fly back to Boston (boo.) Car makes the noise the entire way. I drop Tom off and head back to B'ham. About 5 miles outside of Atlanta, my car makes a huge clunking noise and the steering starts to pull. I figure I've blown a tire (which is AWESOME since I don't have a functional tire iron with which to change a flat) and pull over to the side of the interstate. Get out, nope. No flat tire. Weird. So I pull back onto the interstate.

My car sounds like I am dragging its rusty metal guts all over the road. It is grinding and clunking and the steering wheel is pulling and it's raining and dark outside. I was pretty sure I was going to die last night. But, I made it all the way back to Birmingham. Sure, I went about 60 in a 70 for 2 hours, and even that was a stretch, but I made it. I was hoping that I would wake up this morning, get in the car to go to work, and the gears would have miraculously realigned themselves. Nope. Not so much. Instead I was greeted with the ABS light. Which according to people I work with means that now my brakes are also broken. Excellent. I dropped the car off at AAMCO this morning and am waiting to hear back on an estimate. I'm fairly certain that this is going to cost about $2,000. So the real question is, new transmission or new car? I have no desire to start a car payment right when I'm hoping to start student loans for med school, but I live in a city with no functional public transportation and I have to drive in the middle of the night all the time. Reliable transportation would probably help in the whole Samantha-not-getting-killed-in-a-car-accident-or-by-angry-hobos-on-the-side-of-the-road effort. So, I am sitting at work waiting for that to play out. Stupid transmission.

In other news, I've already broken my new Treo and I was hit in the head with rainwater in my own kitchen this morning. Today sucks.

*** AAMCO just called.
"Samantha, this is Kent with AAMCO. I have some kind of good news for you? I have checked everything on your motor and transmission and that all checks out good. The problem you're having seems to be with your front end. It looks like someone replaced your brake pads a while back, but they didn't replace your rotors. And your front end has these ball bearings that sit in the rotors. Your ball bearings are so wore out, that they're not round anymore. They're egg shaped. And that means they're not fitting correctly into the rotors, so everytime you move, it's not aligned and grinding in the front. I could just replace the bearings but they're so worn into the rotors that the right-shaped bearings wouldn't fit correctly in there anymore. So, I can just replace the bearings, rotors, and brake pads and you won't have to worry about your transmission."

So, the problem was that my front end was out of control. That makes the 2 hours of driving on the interstate in the dark and rain last night not scary at all. Good gravy. My car will be ready by 3. And that is the first good news I've had all day. Well, that and I didn't die driving down suicide hill this morning. Whew. ;)