A tale of two headlights

It was the best of times as we spent Easter weekend with our families...until driving home Sunday evening when red and blue lights flashed in our rear-view mirror. What a great ending to a quiet Easter I thought to myself. I couldn't have been speeding I said to Bonnie who concurred with me, saying she was watching. I figured out by math that our speedometer reads a little slower than we are actually going so it may have been possible that I was speeding 2-3 miles over, but not enough to warrant a ticket. The officer walked up to the door and asks if we had any idea why he was pulling us over tonight. I told him I honestly had no idea, he then said that our passenger side headlight was out. It had only been a month since we had our safety inspection done which I told him. Needless to say that he let us go with a warning instead of a fix-it ticket. Once we got home I hit the headlight and it came on...go figure.

Saturday I decided that I would replace both headlights just in case they were going out. Getting started required me to take the front of the car apart. Good ol' Honda's have so much room to work with inside the engine compartment. So after about 20 minutes I was finally in a spot where I could change the lights. I quickly was able to get the old bulb out but the next hour I spent trying to get the new one to stay in place.

One of my MBA classes talked about Honda and Toyota being companies that excel at simplifying tasks. As I worked on getting that stupid bulb in place I thought, how can it be possible that a company that excels at doing things quickly and efficiently could have a bulb that takes me this long to replace. I guess that's why mechanics have to be smarter than the average Joe. After thinking about it simply I was able to replace both bulbs and have the front of the car put back together in less than ten minutes. So with many tiny cuts all over my arms and hands we now have headlights that work and are 100% brighter than the old bulbs.

Which reminds me of one more headlight story when we were getting the safety inspection done we were told that our headlight covers were foggy and would mostly likely need to be resurfaced prior to next year's inspection...and that they could resurface them for $40 a headlight. I told him I would have to think about it. I went home and found on Ebay a product that resurfaces headlights for $5 with a little elbow grease. There was enough polish from the Ebay purchase to resurface about 100 headlights ...so if your headlights are getting foggy I would only charge $20 a headlight half the price of the going rate ;)