What's Bringing Me Joy: EverStart Maxx 1200-Amp Power Station

To quote the Shirelles: "Mama said there'll be days like this, my mama said."

Yesterday was that day for me.

I was rejected from a job with a company that previously laid me off. It was a demoralizing blow, another in a long line of rejections but stung especially since I was hoping my previous employment there would win the day.

I needed a distraction. I knew just the thing: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. As I prepared to make my way, I discovered my car battery was dead; the endless cold was just too much for it.

My driveway is angled down, with two high retaining walls on either side—one along my lawn, the other along the neighbors'. Basically, it's impossible to get a car in a position to jump the battery off.

I turned to Courtney's car. It would be my salvation, and after the film, I'd go to Lowe's to get a jump-start power station. I tried to pull Courtney's car away from the curb and—I couldn't move. It was basically snowed/iced in place, its low clearance no match for the mounds that had been pushed toward it from the street's center. So back inside I go, in search of a shovel. I have to dig the car out.

A few sweaty moments later, I'm on my way to the cinema, and the film is exactly what I needed: a big dumb heist movie that let me just turn my brain off for a while.

Afterwards, at Lowe's, I realize I've walked in two minutes before closing. I rush to the aisle, and I see the various battery-related products. Instead of just buying the one I initially saw in my search, I was seduced by one that was a bit cheaper. I decided to get it, and I rushed out without paying too much more attention.

I get home, and I quickly realize that I've messed up: I've bought a battery charger, not a jump-starter power station. To use the one I'd bought, I would need to have the device plugged into an outlet while attached to the battery. This wasn't what I'd wanted at all.

But, I thought, there is a garage at the bottom of this slanted driveway. It's got an old manual door that opens into a tiny, low-ceilinged garage that I don't often use unless it's going to hail. I think to myself, "Maybe I can salvage this if I can put the vehicle in neutral and guide it into the garage." So I go back outside to give this a try.

For the second time in a few hours' time, I'm shoveling. I figure since it will just be me pushing and gravity pulling, I didn't want any big snow banks or chunks of ice to get in my way. A few sweaty minutes later, I'm satisfied I've done about as well as I can.

I get in the car and try to turn it on in order to move the gear shift into neutral. The battery struggles and fails, but there's enough power to allow me to move the gear shift into neutral. Once there, I realize that the steering wheel is pretty well locked up, and I don't think I'm going to be able to do this Plan B.

Dammit. Oh well, I think. No harm, no foul. At least I tried.

But then I got caught in some kind of shitty feedback loop, where there was not enough power (or something more technically complicated was happening), and I could not get the gear shift back into park. Unable to get the vehicle back into park (or again, something more technically complicated was going on), I could not actually turn the vehicle all the way off.

The instrument panel is lighting up like a Vegas slot machine, and then my headlights and tail lights start flickering and blinking and all the while there's this clicking that makes me think I might just be sitting on a time bomb of some sort.

A quick Google search for how to shift the gears when the battery is dead leads me to a small little plastic place covering a hole, in which is supposedly a button that, if pushed with an flat-head screwdriver, would allow me to shift the gear even though the battery is dead. Well, I found everything but the button under the plastic cover. Didn't stop me from sticking a screwdriver in there in a real let's-see-what-happens mindset, and what do you know? That also doesn't work, plus I hear an unsettling crack sound that makes me fear I've messed something up more than when I started.

Finally, I give up. I put the parking brake on, and I go get Courtney's keys yet again and set out, this time to Walmart since Lowe's is already closed. In the hellscape that is Walmart after 10 p.m. when it closes at 11, I could find no one to help me get the actual device I needed out of its theft-proof glass case. A trip to the front of the store to ask for help yielded a "Well send someone back there." I waited, and you guessed it—nobody came. I went back to electronics, which had previous been devoid of workers, and found two this time. Told them my plight and they made a call that I could actually hear over the store's intercom system. Finally, a little gremlin of a man approached and helped me out. While we searched for a register at which he could ring me up, he was telling me some story about how a certain register in the automotive section didn't like him, so we'd just use this one over in sporting goods. And then he told me that he'd essentially stolen from the store by taking cash for purchases and not actually ringing it up.

"Yeah, sometimes someone will just give me like $200 cash and I won't even ring it in," he said. I nodded along politely and gave him a good-for-you smile, but then I wondered, "Is he making a soft pitch to me for a similar arrangement? Well, I hope not, because this thing's only $100."

And upon ringing it up, it ended up even cheaper at somewhere in the $80s (not sure if that was the doing of the little gremlin man or just regular good luck, but I was happy for it), but let me tell you, folks: The EverStart Maxx 1200-Amp Power Station is worth every penny.

Once I got the thing home and charged it for a little while, it was the only thing to be hassle-free on a Monday from hell. I hooked it onto the battery and it was nearly instantaneous that I could now crank the car and finally cure all the ping-ponging lights on my instrument panel.

If you're living in a cold part of the country and know that some of the colder day of winter may still be ahead of you, I can't recommend this little addition to your garage more highly. It saved my battery, but more importantly, my sanity.