Always admit when you’re wrong.

I am not a man who is afraid of being wrong.  I’ve been wrong many times.  I’ve made bad choices, I’ve made bad decisions, I’ve dropped the ball more times than a cross-eyed center fielder.

But if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know that if I’m ever wrong, I’ll repair my mistakes, no matter what it takes or how long it takes.

Case in point.

My girlfriend Nicole was riding with me in the Blackbird a few days ago.  She said to me, “Have you noticed that your car sounds much louder than usual?”

I thought nothing of it, maybe it had something to do with the Cobalt’s horsepower, maybe I just needed my tires rotated.  “No,” I replied.  “Sounds fine to me.”

But the car’s noise increased in volume over the next few days.  The handling didn’t feel as smooth and luxurious as it once did.  This is not good.

So I had the tires rotated.  The noise remained.

I poured some fuel injection cleaner in the gas tank.  The noise remained.

And at that point in time, I had three options.  I could:

(A) Ignore the noise and just continue to equate the volume to the powerful motor on this naturally-aspirated whip.

(B) Rotate the tires again.  Maybe they just weren’t in the right combination.

(C) Crank the radio up and drown out the noise.  Your car doesn’t make noise if you’re singing “Carry On Wayward Son” at the top of your lungs.

And in the end… I chose Option D…

And Option D meant that I would take the car over to my repair shop of choice, Ernie’s Auto Repair in Green Island, and have Ernie Remillard and his team diagnose the issue.

One of the techs hooked up a computer diagnostic tool to the Blackbird, started the car, and checked the printout for codes.  And one of the codes that came up was an oxygen sensor that has gone bad, or one of the exhaust tubes has torn a hole, causing the oxygen sensor to malfunction.

Either way, the Blackbird’s going to need a tune-up and a replacement part or two.  I left the car with Ernie and his top-notch crew.

A little while later, Ernie gave me a call.  There was a tiny hole in the exhaust tube.  Repairs were needed.  And repairs were completed.  Including repairs to the Blackbird to eliminate the nasty rumbling noise – apparently that noise came from a wheel bearing that was about to disintegrate.  It might have been falling apart before I even got the car, and I wouldn’t have noticed because I would never have known the car to make any other type of noise.

Part two of the story.  Last Wednesday night, I took Nicole out to dinner.  We had a great time, and then – all of a sudden – the lights flickered in the restaurant.

You know why that happened.  Storm was coming.  Big fat F2 tornado.

We waited in the safety of the restaurant until the major part of the storm flew by us, then I drove Nicole safely home – avoiding the downed tree branches and power wires and flooded roads.  I even picked up a chunk of a branch from a downed tree in my car’s rear fender.  That’s going in the scrapbook, for sure, for sure.

Imagine how more terrifying that would have been if the Blackbird broke down at any point in that night.  I don’t even WANT to think about that happening.

See, this is why I have a dedicated repair shop like Ernie’s to take care of the Blackbird, whether it’s a tune-up or a terminal case.  And Nicole was right.  She noticed the initial problem and I didn’t.

But here’s the ancillary part of this whole story.  This isn’t just about car maintenance.

This is about Chuck maintenance.

See, I can’t operate on strict autonomy any more, I can’t live my life as a lone wolf.  I have to trust when someone brings something to my attention.   It’s okay to ask for assistance.  It’s okay to ask for guidance.  It’s the same thing when I play competitive team trivia.  Yeah, it’s okay to be a “one man wrecking crew” now and again, and compete against teams of three or five or ten.  But it’s also great to have teammates, and over the years I’ve had some of the best trivia teammates ever.  Still do.

And it’s okay to admit when you’re wrong.  I dismissed the noise as just an operating side-effect, as just a common noise that a car makes.  It could have been so much worse.

Maybe there really are angels watching out for me.

And sometimes an angel needs to bonk me in the brain to make me pay more attention to life.