The One-eyed Nissan

The one-eyed pirate finally got his other eye fixed on Friday. I am talking about my Nissan's head lights. I am not sure from when it had been wearing the eye patch, but it is many months since I had clearly seen the road during the night. And it was the left eye that was hurt added more difficulty of seeing the road. Please note, in US, the steering wheel is in the left side of the car and naturally the driver has to hold the steering wheel while seeing the road. With not much experience in driving car at nights (I couldnt drive at day time either as I didnt have license before), I first assumed that it is the maximum brightness from any proper headlights. And sometimes, I would blame my glasses which many times is covered with fingerprints. But it was not before hyperactive HemanT(pronounced 'T' stressed) noticed the patch on the left eye that I understood that there was nothing wrong with my eyes. I understood that I had to fix the headlights soon. Even so, as people say there has to be time for everything, the time never came for fixing the head lights for a very long time.

My initial thought of using fix-it-on-your-own proved to be dangerous as I had played repairing toy cars only and the result had always been worse than before. For example, in my childhood when I tried to fix the door of my sister's precious toy car, which she never allows anyone to touch, I had removed the whole body of the car but for some strange reason, I couldnt put it back. I do not remember what happened after that. I can only recall my sister crying on the top of her voice. So keeping away the self-fix option, I decided to search for a mechanic. Consulting with friends who already own vehicles, it became clear that in US, the service charge will be costlier than the product cost. No wonder, IT service industry is a very costly business here and it is a boon to all the Indian IT companies for drilling money better than oil through mass and cheap labour. Because of these reasons, I spent more time on trying to find the economic store that will not drill my wallet. And it took me 2 months to understand that there is none to fix my car without drilling my credit card through my wallet. And thats why at last I took my car to the Nissan authorised car service center who charged me 40 bucks for doing basic checkup and reported that everything was fine including my head lights. Only after asking twice about the left eye of my car were they able to identify the problem. I just wonder how difficult will it be to test the car head lights? May be the mechanic checked everything by sitting inside the car like me. Or may be he was having problems with his eyes that he couldnt identify the brightness (not)emitted from the head lights. Or may be he thought my car was winking at the new Nissan 350z parked next to it. But he should have realised that something is wrong when it winked at the Nissan Frontier truck. Whatever it may be, he finally fixed it by replacing the head lights and added another 40 dollars to the bill. With the card swiped and 80 dollars bidding bye-bye from my wallet, my car got its eyesight back and it winks no more at others including Porchse Speedster at night.