Caution: Teenage driver

Saturday morning I went out to do my grocery shopping and errands. When I got into my car, it was dead. Totally, completely dead. I turned the key and…nothing. My son had been out the night before and somehow in the few hours between when he got home and when I went out, the car had died.

My son is a new driver and I'm still not over the worrying every time he goes out in the car by himself, waiting for that call to tell me he's been in an accident. Every new driver gets in an accident, right? (Some time I'll tell you story of my daughter's first accident. Oy. It was a good one.) But apparently he'd made it home the night before safe and sound and parked the car in the garage. It was just...dead.

My husband said it had to be the battery but I could not figure out how it had just died completely. He asked if a door got left open, the trunk lid got left open, the interior light got left on…but no. The trunk was closed, the door was closed and locked when I went out there, and my car has an automatic shutoff on the interior lights so that if you do leave them on accidentally they shut off and don't drain the battery. The headlights have an alarm that sounds if you leave the headlights, once you turn the engine off. I rarely actually turn the headlights on because the running lights come on automatically when you start the car.

So the hubs borrowed a charger from a neighbour and got the car charging and when my son got up (around noon - teenagers!) I asked him what he'd done to kill my car. He shrugged.  He said the car was fine when he got home.  Then he said, oh yeah, it was beeping when I got out.

Gah! He DID leave the headlights on!  I asked him why he left it when it was beeping…didn't he wonder what that was? He shrugged again. He didn’t know what it was so he just ignored it. And left the headlights on all night.

In a way I was relieved that was all it was because I just spent a small fortune on other work on my car and wasn't going to be really happy to spend more on something else. But once the battery was charged up the car started and all was fine.

Now I can only hope that's the worst thing that will happen with having a new driver in the family…somehow I think it's not...