What a Penny Buys You These Days

Back in December, prime singing-along-with-the-radio-month, our car radio died. It just up and stopped working.

I took auto shop in high school and immediately convinced myself it was a blown fuse. So, my husband and I poured over the owner's manual, trying to figure out which fuse was for the radio. I, being the more limber half of the couple, found myself upside down in the drivers seat shining a flash light at the fuse box where the radio fuse is located. Why Toyota puts the fuses for this car in two separate locations is beyond me. But, there I was, completely upside down with the little tool the aforementioned car maker provides you, plucking the fuse out of it's itty bitty space. The fuse was perfectly fine. I was a little dizzy from having all the blood rush to my head but quickly recovered.

Luckily for us, we have a neighbor who fixes cars for a living and was kind enough to remove the radio and bring it to his dealership for repair.

"You'll have it back in 2 or 3 days. 4 tops," he said.

That was in January.

You see, when our stuff goes, it goes big time. We don't get little leaks in our plumbing. We get huge, rip-the-wall-out leaks. And then the leak comes back and we get to rip out the wall AND the ceiling all over again. And then our neighbors break their toilet tank and five gallons of water pour through our ceiling. On. Christmas. At 11:30. But I digress.

It is the same with our radio. It was just a quick little rewire job. That didn't work. Then they found a penny in the radio because even though my kids don't know what a jukebox even is, that didn't stop them from putting a penny in the cd slot to see if Bobby Darrin would sing them a song. And the entire radio shorted out and required a part from Japan. Said part was delivered and installed into radio and then things happen and people get busy so we weren't all that hot to get the radio back. Then our kind neighbor put the radio back in our car when he happened to be home and we happened to be home on the same day.

AND THEN IT DIDN'T WORK.

So our kind neighbor drove our car to his dealership, and had one of the guys try to figure out what was wrong with it. This entailed removing the entire dashboard to see the electrical wiring in its entirety. Well, it seems this penny my kids thought belonged in the cd slot of the car radio really killed it. Killed it as in "we'll have to go to a junkyard and get you another one" kind of killed. Dead. Ceasing to work.Kaput.

When John came home and gave us the final diagnosis that this penny, this stinking one-cent coin, is what really did the radio in, the kids were standing next to us. Almost like a movie, upon uttering the phrase "the PENNY is what killed the radio," we turned to look at the kids. Smart children that they are, they could sense our displeasure and quickly ran to play in their room, ignoring our "so who exactly dropped the penny into the radio?" questions.

The children are now barred from sitting in the front seat to pretend to drive to California (or wherever they pretend to go) while we unload groceries or pack the car for a day out.

The bright side to all of this? We get to listen to the kids sing when we drive anywhere. If you've ever heard a two year old sing Bob Marley's "Bad Boys," you know that beats any radio station, hands down.