One of my friends went out of town recently for a vacation on the lake. Unfortunately, it was cut short by a dead battery. Can you imagine? Driving out to the lake, all the while towing a jet ski, only to push it into the water, let it float out, and have it not start? He ended up being stranded on a useless jet ski for quite a while before another boat passed by and towed him to shore. And to think, all of that could have been avoided had he stopped by Battery Joe to get everything checked out and charged. Don’t let a weekend go to waste, let us help.
Anyway, his story got me thinking about other times a lack of batteries has resulted in undue stress. That took me back two years to Christmas, a time when everyone is supposed to be in a good mood and is enjoying opening presents together. My family has a different tradition; we bet on who’s going to cry first. These days, there are fifteen children in the house when everyone gets together, so it’s pretty much a tossup as to who it’ll be and what will set them off. This year was especially traumatic. One of the kids had been waiting patiently for his turn to get a present. He sat quietly as others opened presents all around him. When it was finally his turn, he got so excited and immediately shredded the wrapping paper to reveal exactly what he’d asked for, a Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 Dart Blaster (sounds scary right?!). His brother had been shooting him with a puny, manual Nerf gun all morning, so it was finally time to exact his revenge.
He spent the next four or five minutes setting it all up, taking care to put every dart in its proper place and align the stand just right so that the darts would fly directly to their unsuspecting target. His plan was perfect, or so he thought. His eyes narrowed and his little finger pulled the bright orange trigger… He waited… Nothing happened. Panic took over. How could his gun not work? This highly sophisticated machine he’d been waiting for had let him down in his time of need. It was too much. Tears began to flow and he was lost in grief. At first, no one could understand what the problem was. It looked perfect and he surely set it up correctly. Then, someone found the problem. The batteries weren’t included!
This is something we never seem to think about until it catches us by surprise, inevitably throwing a massive wrench into any situation, but think of how many times grief could have been spared had a working battery been present! These are just a few “Batteries Not Included” situations I have personally experienced.
- Pulling the batteries out of the remote control to power your first Gameboy color… pulling the batteries out of your boom box to replace the batteries from the remote… Etc.
- Yanking the batteries out of your Furby (90s kids) because you can’t replace them to make it stop sounding like a fuzzy demon baby!
- Fumbling around at your campsite late at night because you didn’t pack extra batteries for your flashlight.
- Becoming stranded in the cold as the result of an old car battery that has given its last.
- Missing the prefect shot of sunrise on a mountain lake because your DSLR camera battery has died and you didn’t pack a backup.
Trading stories like this makes us appreciate our line of work just a little bit more, knowing that we can be the answer to almost any of these problems. It also got us thinking; what if you had to live life without the use of anything battery powered?!