Yesterday evening, bigmac called me and said lets go. He need my company on a little crazy trip down to Skåne to pay a visit to an idiot who has been doing a lot of trolling on some internet forum. Bigmac just wanted him to know that the internet was not some sort of imaginary universe where you could talk shit about people and get away with it.
Anyway, bigmac took his fathers rather nice Mercedes so we would get there faster. This turned out to be a mistake. However I had a field day with excellent movie quotes and bad Star Trek engineer impersonations.
The car had recently suffered some damage and despite the technicians as always saying it must be user error we all knew that this time it was actually system error. The car was totally insane. It kept showing error messages on various systems. Panels were blinking on and off. One moment, the climate control was on, another moment, it suddenly disengaged and went dark. Lights in the cabin were on and off periodically and and various other systems kept blinking on and off. The car kept complaining about low power and kept shutting down various systems.
As you can imagine, this gave me the opportunity to utter wonderful phrases such as Diverting power from live support to navigation! and so on. Eventually however the car decided that diverting power from life support to navigation was no longer a priority, and it decided that it was time for some life support to be restored, and that navigation was no longer a priority. In this kinds of situations it decided that headlights were a near useless convenience function (which the car claimed were unavailable due to low power) and decided to shut them down.
As most people are aware, roads are sometimes lit up with large lights overhead. However, as most people are also aware, these lights tend to only exist near large cities. We were not in such a place.
Well, all went well, hit the breaks, enable emergency signals (which were blinking somewhat sporadically) and wait for the lights to come back on, which they did a few seconds later. During all this time we had sporadic wind shield wiper control, no side indicators and the windows could be opened, but not always closed. As we kept driving, both headlights never went out again, but the car could not decide if it wanted to keep both lights on, and so it kept turning off one of them. This made the road, and indeed the inside of the car look like somewhat of a disco.
We decided that the car was not fit for an 8 hour trip and declared the mission a failure. At which point I enthusiastically quoted from one of my favorite games of all time, Tie Fighter.
Alpha One, Abort Mission, Mission a Failure.
