I had baby duty this afternoon, and the rascal fell asleep in the backpack as we walked the dog. I transferred him to the sofa, then set one cell phone next to him and called it from the other. I call this the Verizon Baby Monitor. He stayed asleep while I showered, phone at the ready.
 
this also gave me time to troubleshoot the sedan, online. Yesterday its power steering seemed to fail intermittently. Squeeky said it happened to her, too, and the windows wouldn't work. I heard clicking under the dashboard simultaneous with all that and the seat-belt warning light, and the combination of symptoms put me in dread: Gremlins.
 
Simply put, the steering shouldn't act up simultaneous with electrical items such as the windows and radio (a late-discovered symptom). Those systems don't talk to each other, or at least they should not. Way back when, Gordon Baxter wrote a delightful column about a friend's brand-new Chevrolet Caprice that behaved as if its electronic mind had gone M5. No one ever solved the problem; they just sold the car in the daytime, when no one would be turning on the headlights, trigger of all the weird interactions.
 
Problems that complex befuddle me. The only way to remedy them is to talk to someone who's done it before. For that, I again have the Innertubes to thank.
 
At the Ford Taurus owners' club, I keyed in "steering windows radio" and racked up a dozen hits from other Taurusians who'd had the same problem. Reading them in chronological order, I found myself rooting for each troubleshooter as he blew money on wrong answers and reported back to the thread: it's not the alternator; not the battery terminals; not the connectors under the dash. Without this narrative, I'd have been as blind as the first victim.
 
Finally, someone nailed it: the transmission selector indicator, also called the neutral safety switch.
 
which makes absolutely, positively no sense. The gear shifter should not affect the windshield wipers. But on this car, and maybe others, it does, and I confirmed it by shifting into neutral when the radio failed. The radio promptly came back on. I would never, ever have guessed the connection.

If I ever need my sense of wonder restored, I will go back to the Ford Taurus message board and search for "crazy."

The good news is, I got the part shipped to me for $25. The best news is, it appears to be a 15-minute operation with no spillage of oil, or (with any luck) blood.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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