Easy Come, Easy Go

I had my car in the shop yesterday because it wouldn't start. It wouldn't even crank, it would just give me a whirring sound and the dome light would flash. Very odd. $1500 later it turns out that my alternator went bad and took out the battery in some sort of murder/suicide thing. Most likely unrelated to that, my coolant system had also been leaking (which may have been going on, intermittantly, for months), due to a bad lower gasket valve(?) or something like that. I would have thought that the service manager was making that one up except that while my car was gone I decided to sweep and mop the garage floor, and I noticed that I had a nice coolant stain which I had never noticed before. Anyway, yeah, cars are great, aren't they? The two good things about this story is that I was able to get my car towed to the shop for free, due to my AAA membership, and I had kept a coupon from the back of a SLU basketball game ticket which saved me 10% on the service cost. So I saved money! Yeah, that's it...