QOTD: What's Your Major Malfunction?

As I type this, the icy tentacles of major cold snap are beginning to be felt in the Midwest and Northeast, sending frigid residents from Montana to Maine to their computers in search of cheap timeshares in Tampa. Meanwhile, forecasters in this neck of the woods — who smugly called for average to above-average temperatures for the duration of the winter — magically get to keep their jobs.The onset of a deep freeze stirs up so many memories, none of them good.Let’s see, there was the Plymouth Sundance with sticky valves that turned over with a series of small explosions on especially frosty mornings. Then there was the ’89 Prelude with a driver’s side window that stopped four inches from the top of the frame. How can one forget the drive home on a morning where the windchill factor hit minus 47 Fahrenheit?Oh man, does cold weather ever make driving a pain, though your author once suffered frostbite while waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for public transit. There’s an “it could be worse” argument within easy reach.From car doors freezing shut due to poor door seal design to windows freezing open due to aging scissor-type assemblies, Mother Nature’s wrath hits owners of older cars the hardest. (Is there enough juice left in this battery to turn this hunk of iron into a warm, whirring machine? Let’s pray and find out.) When the mercury plunges, everything becomes a chore. And when something goes wrong, chores become torture.Without a doubt, the most infuriating (and odd) cold-weather malfunction in this writer’s history had nothing to do a part defeated by low temperatures. It was a part defeated by the need to stash food away for the winter. Years ago, that aforementioned Prelude, equipped with delightful pop-up headlamps that rotated into place with a satisfying clunk, fell victim to nature’s most troublesome beast. A squirrel.With a fierce wind raging on top of the subzero temps, a turn of the ignition key brought one of the Prelude’s headlights into action, with the other stopping at half-mast. Lifting the hood and peering inside the mechanism, I quickly saw the cause of my car’s droopy eye: a big freakin’ nut.Yes, as my car sat innocently outside my university, some enterprising squirrel had stashed the green, spherical product of a black walnut tree in my headlight assembly, despite the fact that I had never seen such a tree anywhere near the campus. The tight confines of the assembly and the surprisingly large fruit meant extracting the foreign body was easier said than done. The wind howled. Curse words flowed faster than water over Niagara Falls. Bare hands turned into rigid claws.Ultimately, I persevered.So, B&B, cast your mind backwards in time. What’s the most frustrating vehicular issue (malfunction, quirk, breakdown, etc.) that ever cropped up due to the cold?[Image: Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY 2.0)]