Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

So I'd been noticing recently that when I would arrive somewhere and go to get out of my car that my car doors were unlocked. My car doors used to lock when you hit 15 miles an hour. I confirmed that, yep, it wasn't doing that anymore. I kept meaning to look into it, figuring it was a fuse or something.

Driving home Friday night, I was looking through the owner's manual and found that it wasn't a fuse, but some super secret magic spell... some odd thing where you turn the key back and forth four times and then immediately hit the lock or unlock button. Somehow I had actually managed to accidentally perform that feat and had disabled that feature. Excitedly, I looked for a parking lot, pulled over, tried it, the car beeped at me, and then looked at the parking lot. Small, but deserted. If I was careful, I could get the car back up to 15 and then back to 0 again before the rock wall. Just barely. But, the doors locked. Success.

So I read some more during the rest of the drive home and discovered that I could also make the car beep or not beep when arming or disarming, and change how many presses of the truck key were necessary to open the truck. Right on. It's always cool learning something new about a toy you've had for 9-1/2 years. I brought the manual in the house and skimmed the rest of it without finding any additional secret tricks, but I'll have to check Google to see if there are any that they don't want you to know about, like the secret codes for cell phones that let you into all kinds of special menus and screens you're not supposed to see.

Only thing left is to figure out how to get it to operate the garage door. There's a weird trick that involves multiple people and a ladder since it's a newer garage door and apparently more secure than the old one that was on my apartment's parking garage. Dang... I've had this car longer than I've been married and now I have two kids. Geez. I think I need a new car. Even though I love this one and love not having a car payment. And it only has 64,000 miles on it.

I am definitely reading the owner's manual for my next car.