YouTube is now my personal mechanic

I’m not really the most mechanically-inclined person, believe it or not. Whenever anything breaks or needs to be replaced, there is a decent chance that, should I try to fix it myself, I’ll only make things worse. Or at least, that is how I feel at least, which is really half the battle sometimes. In a lot of cases, I would rather leave it in the hands of an expert than try to muddle along for two hours only to realize that I indeed am in over my head and need to pay someone else to do it anyway.

So when the headlight recently went out on one of our vehicles, I internally groaned. I knew very little about headlights and how easy or difficult they were to replace, my knowledge largely extending to the fact that headlight fluid isn’t actually a thing. However, what I could guess was that it was very much one of those things that one could probably do yourself, should you be inclined to do so.

A bit of research later and it turns out that it was as I suspected. Or at least, sometimes. It seems the act of changing one’s headlights can be a task that is either extremely easy (or maybe just easy for someone like myself) or exceedingly difficult, depending on your model of vehicle. Great.

A quick flip through the owner’s manual and it seemed that our vehicle likely fell more in the camp of the “you can do it yourself” variety. In fact, it looked so user-friendly that it would have felt shameful as an adult human being to pawn the task off on someone else, even if I was paying them, so I decided that I had no choice but to fix the thing myself.

After purchasing the new headlights, I went to the great fount of knowledge that I always turn to in such situations; YouTube. The sheer amount of “doit- yourself” tutorials on the site can make even the least mechanically illiterate (i.e. myself) feel like a seasoned veteran…or at least that you have a seasoned veteran holding your hand through the entire process until you realize that it is indeed out of your hands.

My guide this time was Ed, who was quite eager to show me just how easy it was to change out the headlight in a Honda CR-V from 2011 to 2016. He started off by saying that it’s a very simple procedure, and given the video is only three minutes in length, I hoped that he was right. That being said, I’m pretty sure my calculus professor in college said the same thing about finding the derivatives of inverse trigonometric functions, so “simple” is very much subjective.

Ed’s next step was to verbally explain how to unlatch the hood, a process that included Ed feeling the need to explain that one needs to open the door to the vehicle to get to the latch, so at this point I was actually feeling pretty good. If the bar is set at knowing that one needs to open the door to get inside the vehicle, I was probably going to be okay. He also made sure to let the viewer know that they should close the door after pulling the handle to release the latch on the hood, which honestly I felt was more of a personal choice rather than an absolutely necessary one to fixing the problem at hand, but I digress.

Once the very difficult task of getting my hood up was completed, it was merely a matter of disconnecting what Ed referenced as the “connector,” taking the rubber protector off, and then releasing the bracket holding the bulb in place. Once the bulb was replaced with the new one, it was just doing the exact same thing in reverse order to secure the bulb and then to do the same with the other headlight. Ed then made sure to reiterate how very simple this procedure is, noting that anyone can do it. But then again, Ed hadn’t met me, so there was that to consider.

However, as it turned out, he was probably right. The whole thing turned out to be much easier than I had feared it might be, and even I couldn’t screw it up.

So thanks, Ed from YouTube. Couldn’t have done it without you. For anyone owning a 2011 through 2016 Honda CR-V that is struggling to change your burnt out headlight, I highly recommend Ed as your virtual sherpa through the process. For everyone else…uh, at least I didn’t talk about sports or movies this time, right? Tune in next week when I explain the very simple process of finding the derivative of an inverse trigonometric function!

A C ertain Point of V iew