shine on, third one

so, the other day i fixed a problem in my car i didn’t know i had…

…don’t ya just love when that happens?

i was leaving the chiropractor when i noticed a weird black thing along the middle of the roof line of my car near the back window. when i got home, i crawled in the back seat to discover that my third brake light, which is along the top of the back window, was practically falling off. i tried to tuck it back in with the two tabs i could see on the side but they weren’t springing back so i figured they were busted and i just needed a new light.

i went in the house and looked up how much they were on eBay ($50-80 used) and then looked up a how-to on how to replace it, which was when i discovered those tabs never HAD springs, they had to be slid in place and locked, for which you had to take off the cover. i popped the cover, re-seated the light and popped the tabs out into their locked position. light was perfectly in place, and i snapped the cover back over it.

when this happened i figured washtub, where she had been washed the day before, had probably just wiped the back window so vigorously that they had caught a towel on the light, yanked it out, and tried to tuck it back in place. keep in mind there is a bit of a precedent here – they had used my air freshener once to hide the fact that they’d broken my front dashboard air vent previously.

but a few days later i realized it more than likely wasn’t them.

ya see, back in 2018 i got betty’s windows tinted. to be more accurate, the UFC got betty’s windows tinted as a birthday thing for me. i’ve had tinted windows in both convertibles, but never of my doing, so i never got to call how dark they were. now that i did i picked the darkest tint that could legally be done in texas. i drove home realizing, “holy fuck, that is DARK!” the first time i drove her at night i noticed that when i hit the brakes, the whole back window, on the inside, lit up red as fuck. i just figured so it went with the darkest tint you could do and an LED factory third brake light.

but no.

it turns out that, apparently, when he pulled that brake light so he could install the tint he didn’t put it back in right, and while it took it over three years to wiggle out where it was visually noticeable from the driver’s seat, it was out just right to cause that hella glare. once i resat the light around 97% of that glare went away when i drove at night.

who knew?