Rat Crap!

My car is basically brand new. His name is Orion. He’s a Toyota Prius. I’ve had him about two years now. He has about 20,000 miles on him.

So I’m driving to work, like usual, I had just dropped Brian off, when all of a sudden my accelerator stopped working. I just thought, oh Prius! I tried to use it again and it wouldn’t accelerate. It then flashed warnings at me. Check engine as well as the big fat red triangle with an exclamation point (that means BAD). So I pulled over. I’m on 270 I thought I can’t break down here, I got to get to work.

I just restarted the car. The warnings were still there, but I tried to get it to work. I was like a mile away. I drove it as far as it would go then it stopped going. Oh joy! I’m in the middle of the frickin road! I call Brian and freak out on him cause he just changed the air filter last night, thinking he did something. He told me to call Geico, so I did.

They were really cool. They called a tow truck for me. For free. They said an hour, so I called Bri to let him know. He was on his way, he called a taxi.

I waited there, must have been like 20-30 minutes just sitting there in the middle of the road. A cop came by but didn’t offer any help. Got lots of honks. But I actually had a woman in a minivan stop to see if I needed help. Just thinking, man, people are not like what they used to be.

Anyway, Bri finally got there. Then a cop shows up. This time one who wanted to help. He said we should push the car over, out of the road, so we pushed it over to the side.

I hugged Brian and walked to work. All that’s left is waiting for the tow truck and then Toyota.

So Bri went to Toyota with the car. About an hour and a half later they diagnosed the problem… it was rat crap. Rat crap had gotten into my engine.

Apparently rats and mice like to live under cars at night. While they’re there they poop and sometimes chew through wires. No wires were chewed, luckily. Just the poop got sucked into the air filter and had a hole in that, then into the engine.

Weird, huh? The bill will be around $200. They had to replace the air filter (which Bri had JUST replaced the night before) and clean out the engine.

Crazy… Size_t will now be in charge of watching for mice at night.