A Senior Moment

A Memorable DUH ...

Have I got a Senior Moment to share with you … I’ve even gone so far as renaming it a Memorable Senior Moment.

It’s one of those situations where you smack yourself on the forehead with your palm, because you missed something important that should have been so damn obvious …

After much thought and many discussions, we made a major move from cold and snowy Pennsylvania to warm and sunny Florida, where every day is a barefoot day.

The house we bought was in The Villages, and it came with an electric golf cart. The only thing we were ever told about it was to make sure its six new batteries always had sufficient distilled water in them, so we wouldn't burn up the batteries.

We were told to open the battery caps once a month, look down inside with a flashlight, and always make sure the water level is just above the metal plates you see down in there.

Okay, no problem. Pffft, we can do that ...

Our golf cart was one of the things we loved best about living there, and we did everything we were supposed to do. Like clockwork, we checked the batteries and topped off when the water level got low. We used a turkey baster to get the right amount of water into the itty-bitty holes.

We named our golf cart “Lucy” and made sure we took her for regular well-baby check ups, including tires. On one such trip, we learned Lucy had a top of the line souped up engine, although we both agreed we had no plans to drag race her. It was nice though being able to rocket blast past a slow-moving golf cart on one of our adventures.

Now, fast-forward six months. Robert and I had several errands to do and they were in three different parts of town, which is a lot of driving. No problem. Our Lucy was a powerhouse with a high-end engine.

We had finished two of the errands and were on our way to the third, when Robert suddenly noticed the battery gauge had plunged into the red danger zone -- the "you don't have any battery juice" zone.

We had just gone through a tunnel under a major roadway and could hardly get up the incline to the other side. We had gone this far before, with no trouble --something was wrong.

We pulled off the path and parked on the grass. Immediately, the battery gauge went back into the green zone, meaning we had plenty of juice in the batteries. Strange. We called Mike at the service garage. He told us it sounded like the batteries were going bad. We told him they were only a year old and still under warranty.

He asked whether we kept the water level up above the metal plates in the battery cells. Robert told him we topped them off regularly and since it was summer, we even checked them every two weeks, instead of once a month.

Mike asked him to check, while they were on the phone. We lifted the seat, which is where the batteries are, and Robert took off a cap and peeked inside. "It's full, Mike."

While he did that, I took a cap off one of the batteries on my side of the cart and looked inside. It was totally empty! I took off the cap beside it, and it was full. Then I removed one more cap on the same battery. Empty!

"Oh crap, Robert! These cells are all independent of each other!" He gave me a wide-eyed stare. Robert told Mike to hang on and we scrambled, taking one cap off after another and peeking inside.

For an entire year, we had only filled one cell on each battery, thinking if we filled one hole, the whole battery was full of water. There are four white caps on each of the six batteries! That meant we have been driving with only six cells powering our sweet Lucy, instead of twenty-four!

What was really strange is, we had somehow chosen the same six cells to check and fill each time --what are the odds of that? I wondered. When we thought about it, what could be more totally obvious? Why would there be four white caps on each battery, if you were only supposed to fill one of them?

DUH …

Mike warned us we had a fifty-fifty chance the batteries were fried, but we also had a fifty-fifty chance they would last another six months to a year.

We had Lucy towed home, filled all of the cells, plugged her in, and asked for a miracle. I'm happy to report, we got our miracle. But this was one adventure we could have happily done without ...

Now THAT was a Senior Moment … a truly Memorable Senior Moment …

Poet/Writer/Author of 5 books.
Quora Top Writer 2018.
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