There are many things that can drive you to drink. Kids, for instance. I get home before everyone else in my house and as soon as I open the door and see how my daughters managed to lay waste to our entrance, living room and kitchen in about an hour during the morning, it’s sometimes all I can do to not drown myself in a pot of Irish Coffee. Minus the coffee, that is. There’s a reason why this blog is called Why Daddy Drinks, after all.

Another thing that can send you straight to the liquor cabinet is when something goes wrong with your car. Or, in my case, my truck. I drive a beast of a vehicle: a 2007 Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab with a 5.7-liter V-8 Hemi engine. It’s a monster, and it fits me, my wife and both of our kids with plenty of room in the bed for storage. I love the thing.

But like any automobile, things will go wrong and break down. A new set of tires a couple of years ago set me back $1,000. A brake job was around $500. Even an oil change runs about $45 a pop. So when something goes wrong with it, I dread the call to the shop because I can just hear the cash register ringing in the background.

And this week, one of the most-ridiculous things that could go wrong with it did go wrong. And since this is me we are talking about, it had to happen right before Christmas.

In this day and age, nearly every car comes with a remote-controlled key lock. The days of having to fumble with your keys to shove one into a car’s keyhole to unlock the door are really a thing of the past. But, as with every technological advance, there is a new batch of problems that can arise when things go wrong with something.

So with that in mind…Spend a minute and put yourself in this little scene that went down this week:

1) Did you use your truck’s remote control to unlock the thing at the local BART parking lot and get in after you got home from work?

2) And then, did you drive to the hardware store just to pick up a buck-fifty’s worth of replacement Christmas? And when you got out of the truck, after just 15 minutes, did your remote control suddenly not work and wouldn’t lock the truck?

3) After that, figuring that a dead battery was the culprit, did you buy a replacement battery…Only to still not have the remote work?

4) Then, deciding to go to Plan B, did you figure you would unlock the truck with the actual key, the old-fashioned way?…

5) Only to put the key in the keyhole and find that it wouldn’t turn…

6) And then noticed the key opening was a little bent, suggesting that at some time in the past five years someone tried to break into the key slot..

7) Thus making it impossible to turn the key and lock the truck and then unlock it from the outside…

8) Thus meaning you had to leave your truck at home, unlocked, and have your wife drive you to the BART station, at 5:15 a.m. the next day because there was NO WAY you were leaving your unlocked truck at the BART lot during the day…

9) Which then meant you had to drive out to the truck dealership and spend two-and-a-half hours waiting as someone figured out how to program a new key for you…

10) A new key, which, by the way, ended up costing…$293. Two hundred ninety three bucks for one key.

Yep, an unexpected $293 expense, right before Christmas and your daughter’s birthday party. Just what you were counting on.

It’s no wonder I have a little more “Irish” than usual in my Irish Coffee today.