At some time while I was sitting in the Saturn dealer this morning, waiting for their shuttle to give me a ride home, my watch stopped. (Well, it wasn’t exactly “some” time, because it was exactly 10:20 am. All day.) I didn’t notice until much later, but I sort of took it as a bad omen. Here I am trying to get my car working right, and now my watch doesn’t work. I didn’t like the confluence of events.

As I did the last time I had the car in, I explained in great detail the problems I have with the locking system. Sometimes I get locked in. Sometimes I get locked out. Sometimes it doesn’t lock when I put it in gear. And sometimes after I’ve locked it and come back to it, it refuses to start.

I don’t know if all this made sense to the young woman at the desk, but she wrote it all down, every permutation of the problem I could think of. When she called to tell me the car was ready, she said they think there was a short in the locking system that was causing all the problems. They ran it on the computer, and there was no ignition problem, so they don’t know what else it could be.

So they replaced the front door lock, and she told me to start locking my car again, when I leave it. Yeah, I know. It’s been six months since I started not locking the car at the supermarket and the mall. Worse, during that time I’ve bailed out of many car trips because I didn’t want to have to leave it unlocked in unfamiliar (or too familiar) places. I’ve been tethered a little too close to home by this situation (which they also “thought” they’d fixed the last time).

So I took it on faith. I’m going to act as if nothing was ever wrong, at least until it happens again (which it won’t, I’m sure, because I have faith). In fact, I left the dealer and drove directly to the supermarket parking lot half a mile from the post office. I locked the car, walked to the post office and back, and when I got back the car (a) unlocked as it was supposed to, and (2) started just fine, thank you.

Now I’m free to go more places, and I’m also going to get more exercise, because that parking lot is just about the right distance for me to get in a vigorous walk to and from the post office every morning. It’s not a place I would have left the car unlocked, but now I don’t have to worry about that.

It’s just that I don’t know how long a walk I took today, because (as you know) my watch doesn’t work.