For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for March 25, 2010

Gweedo, that sounds a lot like the voice of experience!

That’s not good.

Oh. My. God.

Ooops!

That’s the worst feeling…

No, the worst feeling is that your comic strip is originally from before cell phones, and now you can’t call home and have your wife deliver an extra key! Ouch.

But then there were payphones.

^What phones? How did they work? : )

It’s like giving a kid a gun and not showing him how to use it !

try and find a payphone in a hospital……

had to beg, & I mean beg. to make call from c/s desk.

Finally, someone with a cell just let me use theirs…said, it had a ton of hours left over…. THANK YOU did not really fullly say how I felt.

My husband’s work is an Auto Body shop with a Car-wash on the other side of the building with 10 vacuum spots and at least once a week someone comes in because they vacuumed up their keys, jewelry etc. I will have to print this one out and frame it up for the shop.

If this ain’t the truth, there has never been truth.

howtheduck: The ignition is important, but it wouldn’t be hard to drive without a speedometer! Given how often people fail to signal while driving, I don’t expect that a missing indicator would making driving that much more difficult. If John’s compunctious about signalling, he could always use hand signals. ;-)

So, short of hot wiring the car, how are they going to get it out of the car wash?

are car-key prices as insane stateside as they are here? My son bent one of my car keys (not bad for someone who was about three at the time… :) )

the dealer wanted the local equivalent of about $100 to replace it - they said it can’t be unbent, because it would weaken the metal, and if it wasn’t perfectly straight it could get stuck in the lock and break off while attempting to get it out - and that would be an extremely expensive repair…

the crazy prices seem to be a result of the computer chips they have inside the keys to help deter theft. $100 for a microchip? seems a bit high to me…

they said the manufacturer doesn’t keep a list of key codes for vehicle serial numbers, so if you lose all your keys you are really up a creek - they have to replace some ridiculously expensive computer and all the locks (after you prove that you really do own the car, of course…)

anyone out there with the expertise to confirm or deny all this? does it vary from country to country, and/or manufacturer to manufacturer?

thanks

I ,for myself, NEVER leave my keys in the ignition while I wash my car at the car wash place. I must take my key with me all the time. And I do not leave my money, jewelry and valuable things in my car.

this is an adventure they will laugh about in the future…the distant future. :-)

Uh-oh! This is aboot to go crazy.

No, I didn’t misspell “about”; I’m just trying to sound Canadian since For Better or For Worse is a Canadian comic.

This guy just keeps bringing it on himself! I finally see why she married him. They’re like fraternal twins.

My cars always had keyless entry systems, which helps when I accidentally lock the keys in the trunk, but keyless entry can’t start the car when there is no key.

Wildmustang1262 said, about 2 hours ago

I ,for myself, NEVER leave my keys in the ignition while I wash my car at the car wash place. I must take my key with me all the time. And I do not leave my money, jewelry and valuable things in my car.

I always take my keys with me, regardless. Also, I always lock my truck, even though, CDs, and insurance aside, there is nothing worth stealing….aside from a hockey puck.

When I had that convertible I got in the habit of leaving nothing at all in view when I left the car, even with the top up. Because of that habit, I still don’t. If I must leave anything in the car, it goes into the console, the glove box or the trunk, out of sight. I now drive a car with an electronic ignition, so my “key” never leaves my pocket.

I never leave my keys in the ignition - or make any other mistakes like this. I never have any faux pas to look back on and laugh about. I live a pretty dull life. I’m almost happy to share my boredom with you.

Isn’t that what pockets are for?

This is one of the reasons I keep an extra set of keys on me at all times.

My wife and I drive truck cross-country. We have three keys. One in her pocket, one in mine and one for the ignition. This way one can sleep and not have to worry if the other one locks themself out.

Hehe… dsom8 I like it!

I always bring along a set of fake keys…to lose or get vacuumed up or to get locked in the car.

Of course when I lose my keys those are the ones I always find.

Dear Zev.Farkas,

From what I hear, replacing a car key in the US costs about the same ($100). Someone I know lost their second set of keys that came with the car, and wanted to replace them….they were quoted $100.

Must be an international thing.

@howthe duck, or cash (both paper and coins) or other small but important stuff. I love it when someone catches me by surprise and makes me laugh till I cough, and then cough till I choke! Fortunately I have never yet taken the next step, which is to choke till I…

@wildmustang1262 (82?), it’s just a question of training yourself so that it just feels wrong if you are doing certain things (say, locking the front door of the house or the car) while not holding your keys in your hand. It just becomes a reflex reaction to hold them. You don’t even think about it.

What you *do* have to think about is, is it ok now to let go of the keys and put them in your purse/pocket/etc.

Personally, I find this cartoon affects me like a fingernail being drawn down a blackboard. John is asking for trouble with all the wrong things he is doing. I don’t find it funny at all.

Today everybody seems to say something I want to reply to.

@comixavier, I am Canadian, and once, when I was going to school in California, a girlfriend burst into hysterical laughter, pointed at me, and kept saying, “Say that word again!”

You see, the best way I can explain it in writing, is that when an American says about, they pronounce it to rhyme with cow - that is, a-ba-oh-t. But in Canada, we do have a bit of the Scottish pronunciation, which is more like boot. Said while holding your mouth as tho to pronounce a u.

I never mind it. I always feel, how nice to give pleasure to other people!

@dsom8, do you really think that the height of pleasure in life is to remember the mistakes you amde?

Enjoy your joys!!

If you think you’re too inferior to make mistakes, well, my sympathy, if that’s what you want.

Personally, I would love to invite you over to help me clean up certian parts of my act…

@John Pike, sounds like the third key is for the truck thief!

My experience wasn’t like any of the above mentioned, but it was about 1985 and much has changed since then, I’m sure: I had a new Honda Accord with an automatic lock system, that if you failed to lock the door, it locked itself. I was at the car wash and left the keys in the ignition as instructed; the attendants like to start them up at the end of the wash to make room for the other cars. As soon as I stepped out of the car and closed the door, I heard the door lock.

My car stopped the car wash because the other cars were blocked. They finally pushed it a little by hand, far enough but not too far….no steering!

After this, the proceudre was amazingly simple: The manager of the car wash called the dealershiip where I bought the car, obtained a code number, called a lock-smith nearby who had a code book (All lock smiths have one). and from that number, cut a new key. It seems to me it wasn’t very expensive, I don’t remember going crazy.

that’s was 25 years ago. The good news is that you only do that once!!!

I accidentally locked my keys in my truck one time. No spare keys…..that was fun.

We locked our keys in the car in Denver, managed to get it open, bought 3 more keys. While on the beach in Carmel (same trip), we left 1 key in the glovebox, 1 key in my husband’s wallet in the car, and another key was in my purse in the car. Meanwhile, the 4th key fell out of my husband’s shirt pocket into the water as the tide was coming in. Luckily, after much scrambling, we actually found the key in the water.

@littledutchboy “you only do that once” -I have locked myself out of my company car(s) so many times its an office joke. And, I work in the auto industry, so I should know better. I have done

the ‘key in the ignition with the car running’ bit

the ‘threw my purse, with key inside in the trunk of the convertible’ bit -the ‘called the locksmith (we are on a first name basis) because I locked both the regular key and the spare he gave me inside the car’ bit -the ‘locked key and cellphone inside running car in alley in the slums in DC in a thunderstorm’ bit (that one includes pit bull puppies and cockroaches and trying to convince someone to throw a brick through the window for me. We ultimately opened the car by wedging a a hammer handle between the door and the body and popping the lock open with a fishing rod.)

but my all time favorite happened years ago. I locked myself out of a new Ford Fairmont. I was parked on the street in front of a body shop i had never been to before. The shop manager had a shiny new slim-jim and not a clue how to use it. A guy driving by in a pickup stopped and offer to help. He had the door open in seconds. As he was leaving, he called back to us, “I am a professional thief!”

hehe, I had to shell out about $150 a few years ago to have an extra key to my car (former owner lost one of the keys before selling it to us) - both the chip in the key itself and then the Viper type remote car lock, and the Mazda dealership had to read a code from inside the car somewhere and send off to Japan for a computer code for the key chip. Pretty irritating.

ellisaana, hilarious :D

When my husband and I first started dating almost 22 years ago, he drove a pick-up truck. One night after he drove me home from a date, he hung out for a while before leaving. When he got out to the truck, he discovered he had locked the doors with his car keys still in the ignition. He tried all kinds of ways to get in but nothing worked. Finally, he asked for an old towel and a hammer so he could break a window. Rather than go through either the driver’s or passenger’s side (windows), he decided to break the small sliding glass back window instead, figuring it would be easier (and cheaper) to replace than the other ones. He hit it one time (not too hard because he didn’t want glass to just explode all over us but not too softly so that it wouldn’t break at all) and the latch to that window just popped open (without breaking either the latch or the window)! Since the opening was too small for him to reach through in order to get the keys, I had to do it instead. After that, he started carrying an extra key in his wallet … just in case.

Oh, yeah–what about the winter driving gloves that were under the seat?