I always dread doing work on my car. Today’s project was to install a new stereo.

I bought the car back in March. It already had an aftermarket stereo: the JVC KD-G200. There’s nothing wrong with it. I got something like it for my previous old clunker back in ’01 or ’02 so I could listen to CDs as I drove to Greeley. But that was 10 years ago, and nobody uses CDs anymore. (In seven months, I haven’t even unpacked the ones we moved here.)

What I want now is something that will let me play my iPod through the car stereo. So for my birthday, I got the BOSS 612-UA. It doesn’t have an optical disk slot. Instead, it’s got

• AUX IN for the iPod or other consumer electronics
• USB socket (for a thumb drive, e.g.) (and, possibly, to provide power to your iPod if you’ve got a long drive)
• SD card slot (you can just leave it there so it’s no big deal if you forget the thumb drive)

Pretty cool, yes?

The only problem is getting it into the car. I need to put it here:

Now, you might not guess, but to take the stereo out, you have to take this out too:

Which means you need to take out this:

So you do all that and then figure out that only thing still holding in the bezel is a pair of screws in the ash tray receptacle:

Take those out, trying not to drop them into the hole where the stick shift comes up through the floor. Good luck. @##!?@*! Find your thinnest and longest pair of needle nose pliers, and wonder why you don’t have one of those handy magnet-on-a-stick tools. When you finally retrieve the screw you lost, make a note to put down a drop cloth over the entire stick shift region before doing anything else.

So. There you go. Take out the radio and just plug this white cable into the black socket.

Hmm. That’s not really going to work, is it? I wonder if someone sells an adapter?