Joe McAdory: Charred wire teaches lesson in life

I have a wire. It’s gray, about three inches long, perfectly cut on one end and burned on the other.

It stays in the glove compartment of my car, somewhere between the vehicle registration paperwork and insurance card, and it has a special purpose.

It has no technological use at all. I do not floss my teeth with it, nor have I used it as a temporary shoelace, though neither are bad ideas.

Instead, it holds an indelible purpose.

It serves as a reminder that sometimes the biggest perceived obstacles we face have the simplest
solutions.

There are times when our darkest hour really isn’t as dark as we think.

We cannot come to grips with things we believe are too great to handle, when in fact, problems aren’t always as great as we realize.

Then we say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t so bad after all.’ Take my little wire, for example.

My old Pontiac (yeah, the one I finally sold last month), spit and sputtered a few years back, wouldn’t get up to speed, wouldn’t stay in gear and basically refused to do anything a normal car should do when you mash the accelerator. It was as if every sparkplug under the hood went on strike at the same time.

But a Columbus, Ga., auto repairman found no sparkplug problems, nor did he find problems with the sparkplug wires. He did, however, claim the EGR valve —whatever that is — was faulty, thus, sending a bizarre message to the vehicle’s computer system. We can’t function normally without computers these days, and neither can automobiles. I’d say that car fell a few gigabytes short from time to time.

The EGR valve was replaced and the car worked fine until I put it in gear and mashed the gas.

Um ... guys ... you didn’t fix the problem. Hello ...

Then Mr. Greasy Hands said, “You have a faulty computer system and speed sensor, which must be replaced.”

Oh yeah, now we’re about to cough up the big bucks. Big problem. End of the world.

Eight hundred bucks later, I have a new EGR valve, new computer and speed sensor. That’s a house payment I’ll never get back.

Put the car in gear, mashed the gas ... same thing.

Finally, one of the mechanics found a brain and decided to run a systems analysis on the car. The problem was detected in the area of the new speed
sensor. Five minutes later, the man came out from under the car with the wire, charred and split. No sensor, new or used, would work if the wires did not. A new wire — a $5 part — was installed.

I never got the rest of my money back, and I never returned to the auto garage from Hades. But I did get one thing out of the deal. I learned that not every car problem is a worst-case scenario.

So the next time my car hops, skips and jumps, I look at my little wire and remember it could be something very simple.

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Your problem might just be as simple as a little burned wire.

Joe McAdory is editorial page editor for the Opelika-Auburn News. He can be reached at 737-2549 or