O Dios mio….
Yesterday, in course of my determination to eat böreği with friends, I had to fill up with gas. The drive was quite uneventful, albeit slow in the fresh snow and sleet. For all the #snOMG, the roads really weren’t that bad yesterday. Anyway, the transaction was intended to be quick, much like any other at a gas station.
It wasn’t.
As I was getting out of my car, this guy came up to my door and started motioning to me while chattering away in Spanish. Note: I did study Spanish last year, but….well, it was a year ago, and we most certainly did not cover this situation. After a little confusion, I figured out that his car had stalled and needed a jump. I obliged (in slow English; I really didn’t want to let on that I spoke any Spanish at all, because I had no idea how to talk about cars. More on that below.). So I finished filling up my tank, then gingerly backed up and parked next to his open hood.
Hilarity ensued. By “hilarity”, I mean “miscommunication like whoa.” We began the interaction with a bunch of stumbled confusion over which color was positive. He kept holding up the black end of the cable and saying “positivo”, which was abjectly wrong. My frozen brain finally spit out, “No, es negativo. El rojo es positivo.”: mistake number 1.
He gawked at my sudden bilingualism for a moment, then proceeded to get agitated when I didn’t understand his rush of Spanish instructions. At this point, my brain refroze and the little conversational Spanish I’d retained since Spring ’09 iced over. In the process, I managed to connect up the cables completely backward—which didn’t break anything, but didn’t help either, because my battery was working just fine, thankyouverymuch—at which point this poor, confused man started muttering unkind words in Spanglish. He also demanded to know why I connected the negative end to the engine block. I, in my total ignorance of Spanish verbiage for “grounding” and “hydrogen” and “go boom”, did my best to charade that that’s just how you do it.
At this point, you should soak in the image: me, huddled in the cold, trying desperately to remember any Spanish vocabulary for cars which I may or may not have studied in undergrad; him, trying not to lash out at the stupid American for his ignorance; our cars, giving each each other confused glances about the complete lack of communication between their owners.
So I stood back and fought the urge to intercede—at this point, he didn’t want me touching anything, and I didn’t want to (he was connecting everything in the wrong order entirely, after all)—while the guy haphazardly connected the cables well enough to jump his car. In the end, both cars started, nothing exploded, and we both went on our way, perhaps a little frazzled from the experience.
Note to self: car repair + stone fortresses of misunderstanding = facepalm. Now, I just need to figure out how to explain electric current and how it relates to attaching the negative cable to the engine block of the non-starting car for purposes of grounding the connection far away from the liberated, highly explosive hydrogen gas from the battery…in Spanish.
I’ve never tested this theory, but I bet the color of the cables doesn’t actually matter. What probably matters is that they should be connected consistently on each side, e.g. if one connects black to positive on one battery, black should be connected to positive on the other battery, and red should be the ground for both sides. As far as I know, there’s nothing inherently “different” about the red cable vs. the black cable. I know this works with speaker wire, at least.
If I were helping him and he started saying “unkind words” to me, I would have definitely considered leaving him there to deal with it on his own. Sure, it wouldn’t be nice of me, but what kind of person acts like that when they’re getting help from someone?
True about the color not mattering as long as it’s consistent. However, if you hook up the cables as though one were jumping the good battery, with the negative end on the working side grounded, it seems that the charge would flow quite unhelpfully.
Yep, you got it!