Window

Started: 2006-06-08 19:06:17

Submitted: 2006-06-08 20:09:28

Visibility: World-readable

Last Thursday, I drove to work so I could go hiking and Hacking Society after work. (Normally I drive to the park-and-ride in Longmont and take the bus in; I simply feel guilty driving into Boulder as the one and only person in a car.) I parked in the City of Boulder garage on Pearl between 15th and 16th, using the sexy RFID parking pass my employer gave me, and parked. When I left, I hit the button to roll down my window. (I'm now driving Lyta, since Yoda gets much better gas mileage, so Kiesa drives further and saves gobs of gas money.) I missed the button I wanted and managed to roll down the driver's side window on the seat behind me. No problem; I rolled the window up, rolled down my window, waved my parking pass over the reader, and left the parking garage.

(I want to put my parking pass and EcoPass (bus pass) on front and back sides of the same carrying case -- ying and yang, in one handy package.)

All was good until I returned to Lyta in the park-and-ride on Friday afternoon, after a very hot day. (I knew it was hot when I walked out of my office at 1700, in the shade, and it was still hot.) The rear window, on the driver's side, was two-thirds of the way down. I carefully opened the car, verified that nothing seemed to be missing, and drove home. Along the way, I figured out what went wrong: Kiesa reported problems with the automatic windows in the past, and this one died on a warm spring afternoon.

I didn't drive Lyta again until Sunday. I poked at the window and thought about beating it into submission. I was too lazy to rip off the door panel and wedge the window up, so I grabbed some duct tape and taped off the top of the window. It held fantastically in the garage, and it looked like Lyta was having window seal issues, not window staying-up issues.

That worked great, until I drove to a local nursery and bought shrub roses. (There a couple of stories to be told there as well, which I'm probably too lazy to record.) When I got back to Lyta, after an hour in the sun, the duct tape had melted and the window fell down.

Kiesa drove with the window down on Monday (her day off), and I drove with the window down on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I took Lyta into our local Toyota dealership to get it looked at. For the low, low price of US$98, I learned that I could spend US$350 for a "regulator" that would fix the problem. I asked if there were some way to wedge the window up so that I couldn't use the automatic feature but it wouldn't fall down either. I ended up with dealer-installed masking tape holding my window up. Ugly, but it's held up so far. I just have to deal with the problem again in the near future. *sigh*