Caveats #2

Caveat Four: listen to the warning

            When you buy a brand new old car and the guy who sold it to you (who is now something like your friend on Facebook, except in real life) hands you only one key—and when you ask, “We only get one key?” tells you yes, that that one key is all that came with the dang thing when he got it at auction—and not only that, but that these are the NEW kind of keys that will prevent people from stealing your car by costing so much to duplicate that thieves cannot afford to duplicate them and thus cannot drive the car away.

            One key is not a good thing.  So you finally remember to take the one key to the dealer, intending to ask them to make you a duplicate—only to find out that the process evidently takes several hours at their labor rates and cannot be done, in any case, until tomorrow.  And will cost, by the way, about two hundred dollars.

            The keys have chips in them.  Computer chips, not little missing chunks.  They “talk” to the car.  People say that money talks, so that makes sense.

            So you go home and do some internet searching, and then resort to the actual Yellow Pages which are still being printed, even in these advanced technical times.  You find a locksmith that will duplicate the key for only $55, which you are forced to admit sounds like a bargain (see phrase about these advanced technical times).  So you drive out to the next town over, find the locksmith and spend a good hour with him. He warns you that your One Key is actually a “valet” key, which does not, by the way,  mean that when you use it the car will park itself.  The locksmith, knowing this and knowing that it could cause problems, still decides to go ahead and try to make you a new key.  He chooses just the right blank key (with just the right Texas Instruments chip in it) and cuts the duplicate teeth into it.  Then he takes out a manual that will instruct him as to how he must politely ask the car, which evidently has a computer in it born and bred only for the purpose of talking to this key, to use that computer to program the new key.

            The conversation with the car goes as follows:  the technician sticks the One Key into the ignition (without starting the car) then tromps once briefly on both break and gas simultaneously (and vigorously)—at which point the security light, which has been blinking since the car door opened,  stops blinking.  Then he inserts the new blank key, tromps on the gas one-two-three-four times, and then on the break one-two-three-four-five-six-seven times. 

            Thus we see that even tromping can count as language, which we actually knew before, having lived with men.

            After that, the security light begins blinking again, and is supposed to keep it up for eighty seconds while the car’s computer to re-programs the chip.   Maybe less than eighty seconds.  Never more.  If the job is done.  And so you stare at the little red light, willing it to stop.  Which it will do, right? 

            Or not.

            There is a second protocol in the manual, this one containing an alternate pattern of tromping and pedal pushing, rounded out with the brisk opening and slamming of the driver’s side door several times.  I am not making this up.

            It seems that a valet key cannot instruct the computer to reprogram anything.  It takes a Master Key to do that.  A Master Key which the former owner evidently coveted as a keepsake.  And which can only be replaced by—you got it—the dealer.

            So you go back to the dealer, resigned to the astronomical cost of additional keys.  And you are very bright, figuring that you will drive out to the dealer in your OTHER car so that he can program the key while you drive over to Walmart to pick up groceries.  Except that he needs the car, as we will recall from the above story, to do the programming.  So you have to drive home and get someone, who is supposed to be at work, to follow you back out to the dealer and then bring you home.  So that you can be there when, fifteen minutes later, the dealer (the service guy, who is really a prince of a person) calls to tell you that, being that you have no master key and are trying to make one, he has to erase everything on the car computer and reprogram IT first and hey – WOO-HOO – you just happen to have bought one of the TWO YEARS’ models that were made with computers that CANNOT BE ERASED AND RE-PROGRAMMED.

            Not to worry.  These computers can be replaced.  At a cost of: $1500 American (NOT, thankfully 1500 pounds, which would be much, much worse).

            Here is the good part: Toyota actually has OWNED their mistake and will replace the computer on their own dime as long as YOU pay for the keys and that re-programming.  So they will, roughly, go halvesies with you.  Oh – and it will take five days to get the new computer.  So you want to be very careful not to lose your one single key during that period.

            At last, you have the keys made—two hundred and fifty dollars for two keys.  You wanted three more keys, but you feel badly about the locksmith who already cut that other key and will have to eat it if you do not go back.  So you only get two from the dealing, marveling at the fairness of the dealer in NOT charging you twice for the labor on the second key.

            Several days later, you go back to the locksmith who spends one solid hour, while you are inside his shop where it is air-conditioned playing with his gorgeous but sharp fanged tiny English bull dog puppy, trying to re-program that key.  “I don’t get it,” he finally says. “I’ve done this before.  I own a flipping SEQOIA, for heck’s sake.”  But after all that, he fails.  And you are left realizing that you now will have to save up another two hundred dollars for ONE key that you could have bought at the same time you bought  the others—which would have cost only another $50. 

Mark Twain once said, “I have done eleven good deeds in my life and lived to regret every one of them.”