Instead, I was informed that the compressor for the cooling system had fried
I have been driving seasoned used cars for as long as I’ve had a drivers license. My family consistently had seasoned beater cars as well, mostly because our Mom was a skilled mechanic and was able to keep all of those seasoned cars on the road much longer than they would have been otherwise. All of us never paid for those repairs beyond whatever parts our father had to source from either the junkyard or from discount auto parts sites on the internet. Nowadays I live on the other side of the country from our parents and can no longer benefit from our father’s skills as a mechanic. As such, our seasoned used car seems to be getting worse by the year. I had to get a modern catalytic converter for the exhaust plan after replacing the cracked radiator. When I first bought it, I had to get a tire alignment to get the steering back to normal. No matter what I do to service this car, there consistently seems to be something else going wrong to take its place. Currently, our car’s cooling system doesn’t work. Air moves through the vents, but it’s either room temperature or hot depending on the weather conditions outside. I was hoping that maybe our car’s cooling system just needed to be charged with more coolant, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, I was informed that the compressor for the cooling system had fried. This was no straight-forward or inexpensive fix, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford it. That meant having to drive the car through the Summer season with no A/C inside. I had to leave our windows rolled down, and even after that I still sweated like crazy.