What are your belts trying to tell you?

Picture this. It's a beautiful morning (in reality it's already probably noon) and you are just waking up, about to get out of bed and suffering from the pounding hangover you got while you were out last night, as the kids say, "turning up". All of the sudden, you hear a horrible screeching noise that makes you curl up in a ball and pray that it ends soon. But it doesn't. How do I know this? Because I'm the guy whose Miata is making that screeching noise, and I can tell you that sometimes the noise persists for quite a while. In an effort to end the suffering of Americans everywhere, I, along with a friend, took on the task of changing the belts on my car.

Now for this post to make sense you have to hear another story. One day as I was driving my car home from the bikini contest where I was a judge, I heard a clang. Immediately I assumed something had fallen off of my car and checked to make sure everything was alright. Since the car wasn't on fire and still moving, I assumed everything was alright and moved on with my life.

And now we finally come to part where these two stories intersect! As we removed the old belts we discovered that my alternator was doing its best truck nut impression, or in other words it was just sort of hanging there, only one bolt attaching it to the car. An alternator is the part of the car that charges the battery while the car is running. When it comes to important things on a car, an alternator is sort of like not having a spoon when it comes to eating Spaghettios. It's just not going to be a fun time.

To put this in perspective, I probably drove over 600 miles with my alternator being kept alive by an old screeching belt, or in other words I was flirting with disaster, cheating certain death, etc. I wasn't on the highway to the danger zone because I was already in it.

After an unsuccessful trip to find a bolt to replace the one that abandoned ship, we decided to just search around the house and found one that we decided did a good enough job of attaching the alternator back to the car. In a way, I owe everything to my old, worn out belts. If you guys wouldn't have screeched (which must have been them warning me in car-speak) and let me know you needed to be changed, I would have never discovered the alternator issue.

Theres a lesson here somewhere, and I believe it goes something like this: If something is wrong, it's best to assume theres a much larger problem at hand and you should probably just cry and hope everything comes out ok.

Thanks for reading!