It was a lovely fall day out at “The Place”. Spice was doing her last mowing of the season, and we had been out picking up chunks of the trees we recently removed.
Work was done, and after a bit of front-porch sitting (admiring the day), I went over to start the car for the trip home. Grasping the key I had left hanging in the ignition, I placed my foot on the brake and…
Click.
Click.
Click.
I let out a long sigh as I realized that I must have left the key in enough to not turn off the car’s electronics. Not to worry, I always keep a car jump starter in my car.
As Spice was getting the mower ready to lock up in the storage container, I opened the back of the car, opened my “big blue storage crate” and… found that my charger wasn’t there.
Prepper fail.
We were 40ish miles from home, on a Sunday (we both had to work the next day) early evening, out in the absolute middle of nowhere. No neighbors nearby, no traffic on our isolated road, no other vehicle. Turns out, not only did I not have the jump pack, I didn’t have my jumper cables either.
What makes this so stupid of a prepper fail is that I have a starter for every vehicle, and I have jumper cables for every vehicle.
Here’s the starter firing up my old car…
Why were mine not in my car? Well… about a month ago, I traded cars. I moved my crate from my old car to my new car. For various reasons, I didn’t like the new car so I traded it a week later for another car, the one I have now. Somehow between my old car, my “one week” car and my new car several items went missing.
So what did we do?
We went to Plan B, which is another one of our preps, our AAA membership. It took about 90 minutes for somebody to reach us (did I mention how rural we are) but we got it started and on the road.
Once we hit the road, we recorded this podcast. Give it a listen!
The moral of this mistake. Even though you have something covered (we had a charger for the vehicle) we didn’t visually inspect that it was IN the vehicle. Without checking, we had no idea we were stuffed.
Spice’s note: This is also a dissection of a common theme I’ve seen when reading about ‘how disasters happen’: The accumulation of many small errors, none by itself very serious. Hear about it in action, why it didn’t go all the way to ‘painful disaster’ (except the embarrassment), and how to keep it from happening to you.
you were “stuffed” eh? lol