Circumstances Beyond My Control
Access sucks.
Anyway…
I managed to blow three fuses last night: one in my car, one in my cell phone car charger, and one in my brain. Luckily, I didn’t have to replace the third one.
So, my cell phone car charger, on a purely mechanical basis, exploded into the power adapter port in my console last night. By mechanically exploded, I mean came disassembled rapidly. The fuse fell out just as I began investigating the situation, and it is now somewhere in the purgatory of unsearchable depths beneath my seat.
So now I have a bunch of metal stuff down in the bottom of the power outlet, my cell phone charger is an empty husk with a cord coming out of it, and I’m missing the most important part of the charger.
I was concerned that the metal pieces might be hot. In a sort of meatheaded male way, it’s probably better to say I was aware there was a possibility that the metal pieces could be hot, so I kept that in mind and went for getting them out of the socket.
This is hard to do, as the typical pincher formation we use, as thumbalopods or whatever we upper primates are called, is a bit fat to slip down into a narrow socket like the DC adapter port.
I eased the three little parts out of there (not even warm) and got out of Dodge, which currently was still the parking lot at work.
Getting out on Refinery Road, I reached down to activate the radio, only to discover that the radio is completely deactivated and will not respond to any button presses.
I didn’t see “Microsoft” on the front of the radio, but I went ahead and shut my whole car off and started it up, with no effect on the radio.
Plugging in a DC adapter that did have a fuse proved that the DC socket was also not working, which made me immediately diagnose a fuse shared between the two devices.
Turns out that this was a correct diagnosis, and I bought the two fuses at the Shack last night (luckily, they still had them in stock). You could see the clerk’s visible excitement when I revealed one of the two issues involved a cell phone.
What this really means is that somehow, some way, those metal parts managed to stand up on each other and short across the contacts of the car adapter port, decreasing its resistance from infinity to near-zero, and ramping up the current to above 20 A, which blew the automotive fuse.
The fuse on the charger was likely fine, but my clumsiness made its recovery infeasible.
I’m planning on this never happening again.