Saturday, August 4, 2012

Early Morning Emergency -- A ROAR in the Garage!

Our neighbor rang our doorbell this morning at 6:30 am.  I knew something must be amiss but I never expected his next words.  "Your car is running in your garage!"  He and his wife had stepped out on their back deck for their morning coffee and heard the roar of the engine!

Ours is a detached garage. And hubby drove the car yesterday afternoon!  Could he have possibly exited without turning off the car?  If so, the poor car had been running ALL NIGHT LONG!  That is not the sort of news a proud car owner wishes to hear.

I grabbed the garage keys and ran out the backdoor. As I skipped down the steps of the deck I could hear the ROAR!  The closer I got, the louder it became! When I opened the garage door it sounded as if the engine was running at a horrendously fast idle and I thought to myself, "This can't be good for the engine!"  I saw $$$ signs floating in front of my eyes...floating and flying across town to the mechanic!
No key in the ignition!!!

But Lo! And Behold! There were no keys in the ignition. Now I know some cars run without the keys but ours does not.

The ROAR continued!

Then my eyes fell on the leaf blower hanging on the side wall.  It was running full blast!

I KNOW hubby would never have exited the garage with that ROAR in his ears.

The only thing we can figure is that the switch was not turned off securely!  We have a wall switch like that...if one is not careful, it stops in the center position instead of "off".


In the past we've had our paper shredder begin running spontaneously.  In the middle of the night!  It's quite startling to all of a sudden, in the quiet of the night, to hear a high-pitched whine start resounding through the house.  I've read that paper shredders can do this. And they have been known to start fires.  So now we always keep it unplugged except when in use.

The leaf blower is now unplugged, too.

And our nice little black car is just fine!

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2 comments:

Debby said...

Oh my goodness! I've never heard of such a thing in my life. I laughed out loud. Must have been frightening, until you sorted out that it was NOT your little black car!

Sandy said...

Wow! What a weird thing to happen. I am going to unplug my paper shredder when I get home from work today.