How Not To Jump A Car | 05/05/06

Ever wonder what would happen if you had to jump a car and put the wires on backwards? Well let me tell you--it catches fire and will temporarily short out the battery of both cars. Halfway through michael's Cinco De Graduation Party Kurt called chris saying he was at work and needed a jump. Since I've had to jump the Taurus dozens and dozens of times I was the ideal candidate to go. So I pull into our lot and Kurt has the cables already on his car. Taking a look I think "fool!" as the red jumper cable was clearly coming off the black node. I swapped them so I had our usual red to red and black to ground. No sweat right? Wrong! Apparently the combination of the Die Hard (hah!) battery and the Nissan Exterra puts the positive as BLACK. This was only noticed after not only did his car not start after a considerable length of charging but after the cord had caught fire and melted substantially around the nodes. Naturally, this killed the battery in the already-unstable Taurus. Fortunately I had a pair of cables as well and once Kurt was brave enough to take the melted heaps of his cables off the cars we reattached the other cables and tried to turn the Taurus on. No dice. I called tchris to come double-jump us but almost immediately after hanging up the Taurus rose to life and planted the seed of life into Kurt's engine. Then we drove back to Chris' house for festivities. Moral of the story? There are two: Red doesn't not always mean positive and Mike is a fool for not knowing the first moral.

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