Here’s the thing: Everything’s hard if you’re dumb.

Although plenty of dumb people can jump-start a car.

The deal is, Pat’s car was at my house for a week while she lolloped off to Hawaii. And because her car spent that much time in the Murr Bollixing Zone, the same zone in which my dishwasher just backed up and I spent an hour and a half removing three screws, and then snapped off a tiny piece of plastic rendering the entire appliance dead as a doornail, her car died also.

Nothing happened when she pressed the power button, except that with its one last flicker of life, she lowered her car window to talk to me, and that was that. So now her window was stuck open, whereupon right on cue it started to rain.

Most people would come up with a plan in this scenario quickly. My first thought was “Well, you’re fucked, I guess you’re staying at my house until the Toyota fairy shows up, and that can be days.” I made a mental inventory of meal ingredients I had on hand and whether I’d changed the sheets on the guest bed. Pat’s first thought, in its entirety, was “Shit. Shit.”

I kept thinking and got a new idea. “Maybe we can jump it,” I said hopefully, although my entire lifetime experience jumping cars has involved me knocking on doors until some man came out and did it for me, a process that required being cute for a number of decades, until it wore off and I got my old-lady card.

“I don’t think so,” Pat said, “because there’s something special about Prius batteries that you can’t just get in there and do it.”

That seemed odd, but then I had the idea she could call her insurance company to see if she had roadside assistance. She said she was pretty sure she didn’t. But she called anyway. First I had to phone her because she couldn’t find her phone, and it duly piped up in another room. The phone call was unproductive. In lieu of a human, there was an instruction to download the app and log in, and another half hour passed, and she ultimately located a human who said she wasn’t in the system at all and didn’t have insurance, certainly not theirs, but she called someone else who said she did. And not only that but she had roadside assistance. So we’re learning all sorts of things around here. Meanwhile I got a garbage bag and stuffed it in her window.

While she was on hold I asked her about her battery. She’d just had the car in for a whole different problem and they’d told her that, by the way, it had died on them. “How did you get it back then?” She said they’d jumped it. The battery place she took it to said it was still good.

Aha! I started youtubing how to jump an old Prius. Didn’t look too hard. The nice Russian fellow in the video said we needed to open the Wehicle to supply Woltage that is Missink from the Bottery. We gave it a go. I had jumper cables (a miracle) and we followed the video. We had to pry off a plastic lid by fumbling with a latch that neither of us could find with our fingers, so I went back to youtube. While I was researching, Pat muscled the thing off by force, which I happen to know is how you break your dishwasher. But it worked.

Then the hard part. See, I’ve watched this numerous times, but years can go by between episodes. I know you snap this on that, and the other end on the other thing, and the third thing over there, and the fourth on a metal part of the car somewhere, but there’s a very specific order and if you don’t do it just that way your whole car blows up and you burn down the whole block. This is why, historically, I have always stood well back and looked ingratiating.

So we youtubed it. I stood across the street and made Pat do the final connection because she’s taller, if not, apparently, any more butch than me, and there were some sparks, but nothing blew up, and my car generously shared its Woltage, and Pat drove off and all is well. And it only took us an hour and a half, same amount of time it takes to remove three screws.

How did the cavemen start their cars in the days before youtube? I’ll tell you. Back then they had Lore. I’m going to get me a box of that. It’s probably on amazon.