Tale of Woe

So we loaded most of our stuff for the event into our car the night before. We finished packing the next morning, and got ready to caravan up with our friends. But the car wouldn't start. We'd left the doors open too long the night before and drained the battery. Ok, bummer but no big deal; I have a jump kit -- a big battery with jumper cables on it. It lives in a secret compartment under my trunk, so I just had to move a few things and open the compartment. EXCEPT, it turns out that the hatchback is an electronic lock, and can't be opened if the battery is dead. So I had to open the back doors and unload the whole back of the car through them, climb into the back, and open my secret compartment so I could jump my car, and then (once I had power) open the hatchback and load everything back in. Awesome! But wait, it gets better. Somehow, I managed to do *THE SAME THING* while packing up to leave the event and go home. Except this time, when I tried to use the jump kit it was all discharged from the last jump and wouldn't work. Luckily, one of my friends had jumper cables. Except I couldn't get my car to start. It kept giving me scary warning messages about my parking gear not functioning. After a while we figured out that it has to be hooked up to the negative battery terminal on his car, not to a ground. I'm not quite sure what the effects of improperly jumping a hybrid are, but I suspect they aren't good. So my car finally started, but it was extremely unhappy, and displayed a prominent warning light. The "have your car towed to a dealership" kind of warning light. So I hooked my completely illicit trailer back up to my poor, suffering car, and drove the 80 semi-mountainous miles back to my house. With that warning light glaring at me the whole time. Happily, it went out when I was driving around town later that night -- I figure either the problem went away or the light burnt out... *grin* I guess as long as it lasts another month...