Here’s how my car greeted me this morning:
“Oh, come on, you big baby,” I said to my dashboard. Surely this couldn’t be an engine warning! A car is a machine literally powered by exploding gasoline inside a four-stroke internal combustion engine. It’s “intake, compression, ignition, exhaust”, or as your raunchier mechanic friends will tell you:
A quick look at the manual — the online one, not the paper one in the glove compartment; we’re not animals — revealed that the default setting for the dashboard systems is to display the “Low Outside Temperature” warning when the engine’s on and the outside temperature is below 37°F (3°C, a.k.a. “almost warm enough to drink on the patio” temperature in Canada):
I changed the setting, because this whining about a couple of days of freezing cold in a place that’s a subtropical paradise the rest of the year shames us both.