The Dora hat saves the day

Anja and I went to the zoo yesterday to get her out of the house while our confinement person (we've hired her to come six days per week for the first month) helped Chieni take care of Reiya.  After we parked the car and bought a Dora hat for Anja in the parking lot, we walked around the zoo in sweltering heat for a couple of hours.  When we got back to the car, we were really looking forward to air conditioning, but the car wouldn't start!  It was pretty obvious that the battery had died.  Having very little idea what to do, we walked over to sit under a tree for a minute.  Already there was the man who had sold us the hat earlier.  We started talking, and hearing what our problem was, he suggested that I call a taxi for a jump, and handed me a business card.  It turns out that people often turn their headlights on when driving through the many tunnels in the area to get to the zoo, and out of the thousand or so cars that use the zoo parking lot each day, several forget to turn their lights off, and their batteries run out of electricity.  (Our car complains if you leave the lights on, so our problem was that the battery was just old.)  This is an opportunity for a taxi driver to make $200 or $300 NT for five minutes' work, so the taxis all carry jumper cables.

So I called the number on the business card.  "I need a taxi", I said to the dispatcher, "but I've got a special problem:  I've got my own car–" "Dead battery?" the dispatcher interrupted.  "What's your parking space number?"  "I'm in the Taipei zoo parking lot–" "Yes, I know, but what's your number?"  "Seven."  "Okay, we'll be there in a few minutes."  It was when I expressed my surprise that the dispatcher knew exactly what my problem was that the hat seller explained what a common situation this was.

The taxi arrived about five minutes later, and with the assistance of the guy who was in the parking space next to mine, we quickly got my car started.  We started driving towards home, and I decided to drive directly to the garage that had fixed the car the last time it broke down (in an underground parking lot that the tow truck was too big to drive into, but that's another story).  When we got there, we were able to watch cartoons in the waiting room while we waited, and the car was fixed in half an hour.  So in all, we arrived home about an hour later then we originally planned.  Have I mentioned how convenient Taiwan is?  And the solution was thanks to Anja, whose Dora hat was the reason why I was able to talk to the hat seller after our battery died.