I worked ridiculously late on Friday, ’til eleven or so. I’d planned to have a quiet night, but Gilby sent out a pubcast, so I headed off to the Phoenix.

I had my car so I only had one pint, preceeded by a Falafel, mmm. Tom ran off early, and then about 1:30 Gilby, Sebastian and I headed off.

Being the consumate gentleman, I offered the lads a lift. Little did they know they’d barely escape with their lives.

Ok, it wasn’t quite that dramatic. At the lights near Gooseheads I went to stick the car in 1st, only to discover that the gear stick no longer had any influence on the gears. Ruh-roh!

For a minute I thought I was just going mental, Ben thought I couldn’t drive for crap, and the car thought "why the !@#$ are we starting in 4th!". I pulled over pretty quickly, and we eventually agreed that the gear stick was in fact cactus.

So it’s 1:30am, we’re in Civic, the car’s stuck in 4th, we’ve got half a tank of gas, we’re wearing sun glasses and it’s dark. Luckily we didn’t have the entire Chicago police force on our tail.

We managed to limp home, getting across Northbourne was a bit of fun. I hope I don’t get a ticket for running the red light, although I was still in the intersection when the light went red, that’s because I was going really slowly, not fast!

I was a bit miffed about my car being broken, I’m not exactly keen on spending money on it. However I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to get it fixed, and was just wondering how bad the pain would be.

Then as I was soliciting mechanic recommendations on #ozlabs, the enigmatic enigma suggested it might not be so hard to fix and gave me a few pointers.

So at about 8 this morning, with my car still caked in ice, I headed out to try and fix the darn thing. Wouldn’t you know it, after 5 minutes of leaning in and poking around I found the, in hindsight, very obvious problem.

Two minutes and one paper clip later she was as good as new, beauuutie!