Materials: Jumper cables, a dead car, a live car, a copy of these instructions, frustration

Step one: Locate your jumper cables. They should be in your trunk. If they aren’t, substitute with bare wire and two potatoes.

Step two: Your cables should have a red and a black clamp. If they do not have a red AND black clamp, see if they have a red OR black clamp. Color the other clamp the remaining color with a sharpie.

Step three: Place your red colored clamp on the dead car’s positive battery node. If you didn’t understand that, it means red alligator bites the car that won’t move’s + sign. That’s on the battery. Find it? Good.

Step four: Put the other red alligator on the other car’s positive node.

Step five: Put a black clamp on the negative node (- sign) of the car that will move.

Step six: Put the other black clamp on bare metal of the dead car. Bare metal is anything on the engine that seems right. A bolt or screw should work. This is to provide grounding, if you don’t know what that means, just do it anyway.

Step seven: Start the car that will start.

Step eight: Attempt to start the car that wouldn’t start. (If you can start the car that won’t start, you should not have reached this step.) If it does, congratulations. You just jumped a car. Drive home convoy-style with the car you are attached to, taking care to not remove the cables.

Step nine: Just kidding.

Step ten: Remove the cables in the opposite order you placed them on. That’s bare metal, donor -, donor +, dead +.

Step eleven: Swell with pride and a sense of accomplishment. Feel like a mechanic, but still go to a mechanic.