Flushing your only key... down a gas station toile

[DrDubzz]

Tuesday evening, my wife and I left our home in Amarillo, TX to visit her family for belated Christmas in New Years. Her family lives in NW Arkansas (Centerton to be exact). Well, to jazz things up this year, her parents took us, her brother and sister in law, and themselves to Branson, MO for a couple days. All expenses paid (hotel, meals, etc). And her aunt and uncle and two cousins surprised us and went up for one of the nights. The plan was to hang out, shop (outlet mall), eat, etc. Just have a general good time and not have to clean up after ourselves.

Well, it's about a 2 hour drive from Centerton to Branson (the way we went anyway). And on this drive there is a small, tiny, no stoplight, town called Alpena. I was relegated to the back seat (I normally drive 100% of the time, but for some reason I did not this time, bad omen) while my wife and her mom were up front. Dad was still at work and the brother and sister in law were coming from Little Rock.

So we stop at the gas station to use the facilities and for my wife to fix her contact. I'm waiting for them to finish up in the potty, and my wife comes out and informs me that she has flushed our only key to our car down the toilet.

She was not joking

The bathrooms were tiny, about 4x6 feet. and one of her pockets was messed up (the one with the key) and she pulled the key out to fix it, but it got caught and fell out of her hand into the flushing toilet. And disappeared.

So she's freaking out, I'm... upset, but don't want to make her feel worse so I stay mostly quiet. We tell the staff (friendliest people ever thankfully), and they inform of that there is a cleanout area for the septic tank, and they're probably caught up in there (apparently this has happened before at that station). So we dig around for a while (ok like 2 hours) trying to find this cover as it was buried a while back before having success. (Note: all cell phones are locked in the car).

So we are using people's phones, calling her dad who is back in NWA getting a key made (not cheap, and he paid for it), and we're running around trying to figure out what to do.

At this point, everyone in Alpena is aware of the situation and is ready to offer their opinion. Thankfully, one guy, knew a guy who works on GM cars. This was good because the Key (for an 08 G6) has a chip in it, that must be programmed to the individual car. He informs me of the manual way to program the key (so we don't have to wait 2 days to use a dealer's computer as it was NYE and everyone was closed).

So to keep this from being several pages, we spent 5 hours at this shell station, had to get a new key, got towed to the nearest deal (Harrison, AR) incase the programming of the key didn't work, my back was sore from digging, etc.

Quite a beginning to the trip. Thankfully, the trick worked and the key was "learned" to the car, and her parents paid for the towing and key (probably 300 bucks total I would guess) and the rest of the trip was a lot of fun and we're now home safely.

So, if you buy a gently used car, and they only have one key for you, make a copy, don't wait until you've flushed the good one.

I will be making SEVERAL copies come monday.

thanks for listening