Each morning Mary starts her car to let it warm up while she scrapes frosted ice from her windshield, fighting fingertip biting wind from the north and the nagging I-just-want-to-go-back-to-bed-I’m-pregnant voice inside her head. As always, me—being the loving husband—decides to surprise her with a remote starter for her car as her Christmas gift. So that she can stay in the warmth of our house, sipping on a hot steaming cup of cocoa as she starts the car from a distance looking through our living room window. Unfortunately that dream is now dead. 

I recently had the remote starter installed and the idea was to keep it a secret from now till Christmas, which is less than a week away. Sounds easy enough right? Apparently not. The starter that I installed allows you to use the factory key fob to remote start the car through some button sequence. And therein lies the problem. The sequence is amazingly simple to randomly discover. So easy in fact, that tonight Mary had accidentally remote started her car as we walked away to attend a family party. 

Door lock. Door lock. Confirming alarm horn beep. A few more button presses on the fob. Starter turning the engine: Ch ch ch…vrooooom! 

“What just happened?”, she said in a state of confusion. 

Quick on my feet I had to act. Two choices came to mind:

A) Play it off and act just as confused a her. “You car is broken! Shit.” 

or 

B) Tell her about the remote starter.

I went with option B. I rationalized that she’s most likely going to repeat the key press sequence on Monday. And discover it on her own. I might as well break the surprise now and see her reaction face to face rather than her excited phone call on Monday.

I had my surprise presentation all lined up. It was going to be something cute, but I’ll still use it to share the secret of how to remote start it. Although I have to believe come Monday that she’ll already know. Which brings me to my point: She already knows what my surprise gift is to to her, yet I have no idea what her gift is to me. Is it only fair that she tells me her gift to me. Eye for an eye right?