Last Wednesday, I was driving over to a site job 60 miles away on a beautiful sunny day. 5 miles into the trip, the rear wiper started going all by itself. I tried all of the switches thinking I could just fool it into thinking it should be cycled off. Wrong.

I got over to the site where I had to drive a long way through the middle of a town. I bet the residents there thought I was one goofy SOB leaving my rear wiper on in the middle of a beautiful sunny day. The good news is I left when it was late and I could sneak away in the darkness of night to hide my shame in not knowing how to stop this damn wiper blade.

On Monday, I was set to take it to a dealer, usually the last place I go with a vehicle. But, if it needed a quick solution from people experienced with this van, I figured the dealer was the proper place to be. They called me up and said it would cost $863 to fix the always on wiper blade. What? I told them that ain’t gonna happen. That was for replacing a body control module that controlled A/C, etc., for the whole vehicle. The cheapest solution was to go into the back panel of the hatch and pull the electrical connector to the wiper blade. Sadly, these guys left it up higher a bit in my field of view when I look back. But, it could be worse.

Like you, I hate cars. However, hardware doesn’t phase me so much since I build all of my own PCs. Laptops would be another matter.

Kind of like the full ashtray bit and all that.

But I feel your pain…my daughter had the same problem with her car – only her boyfriend attempted to fix them himself and ended up bending the blades so that they were really messed up – all in time for the first snowstorm of the season!