Driving home last night , I stopped for gas very near my house. Rutters Gas station, as I pull to an unoccupied pump I notice two cars head to head next to me with both hoods up. Honda accord and a ford somthing or other. I pop my hood and begin pumping gas. I am looking at three kids who seem to be cluless, girl is ford so I say DEAD BATTERY HUH. She says yeah, meanwhile her two rescuers are trying to hook up jumpers right next to a fuel pump and I have never seen so many sparks befor. The one guy sees me and my 914 so he thinks I might be of some help, he says WHY ARE THEY SMOKING LIKE THAT? I look over and notice the red and black wire smoking from both sides right at the alligator. I run over and pull the wires off the live car immeaditely. These wires were so fucking hot I couldnt even touch them, the smoke was from the rubber melting off the clamps. These two stoners had the postive live car to the neg dead car and vise versa. .....



I asked them both if they noticed the + & - right there on the battery.

anyway after 5 min the wires were still hot but I managed to handle them enough to get the girl running and out of there. I told them to chuck the wires, there wasnt much left of them.

thats my story

People never cease to amaze me! ... lol... I've been using that emoticon a lot lately!
Mark D.

Y'know, you gotta wonder how they made it THAT far...

I'm not too proud to admit that the first time I tried to jump a car, I did that same thing (positive to negative).

I even knew better. There were mitigating circumstances (was very late, and I had just gotten off the racing boat after a 24 hour race). Even so, it took me about 5 minutes to figure out what exactly I had done wrong.

I did not mention my foolishness to the guy I was jumping (the owner of the racing boat). Luckily, there was no damage done. And now I always check where my leads are going, while saying out loud "positive to positive."

Zach

I think they did pretty good: There's 2 terminals and 2 wires: Kinda like multiple choice in school. They could have put one of the wires on the distributor...

I guess they had a 50 50 chance of getting it right. Better odds then most.

I am also guilty of this, Once in my life and never again.

Whoa. Good karma for you.

I had to jump a battery recently on my girlfriends sons car, the polarity on the battery was not clearly marked. That's crazy.

Great, now because of you the stoners are not dead and are free to spread their lazy seed throughout the populous.

That's OK Doc- it's called natural selection. Eventually they and their children will be dead due to suspiciously stupid circumstances, and they won't be spreading their seed anymore.

Not that I wish harm upon those whom I do not know....

I had a not so terrific experience with jumping a car. I'm experienced with the procedure, given all the POS cars I've owned. . .but.. .

Some guy who lived across the street who never had so much as a "hi" for me before, suddenly needed help, since his mid 80's, never-washed shitmobile Olds had died. OK, fine--he asked for a jump, so I had some cables and agreed to help.

Anyway, we have them hooked up, and I'm in my then fairly new 1999 Sentra getting the RPMs up a bit. The other guy's car was so freakin dead that nothing was happening, so I see through the crack at the bottom of my hood when the Douchebag decides to try something new and grabs the cables and switches them before I could stop him.

All my gauges went to zero, the dome light went out, but my car stayed running. I turned my car off as fast as possible and jumped out to pull the cables off before any (more) damage could occur--damn I was pissed off.


A week later, and a thousand miles past my warranty expired, my alternator died--$350 bucks. The shop said some resistor in the back of it "was fried".

Nice. No good deed goes unpunished.