So, I got a dashcam for Christmas to celebrate getting my driver’s license! (That was the only thing of note that I received, everything else was clothing-related, which I know nobody here cares about)

However, after spending about twenty minutes getting the entire thing installed in my car (which involved wiring a cable through the entire car just to incorporate a rear camera (not pictured) and more) I plugged it into the cigarette lighter to discover… nothing. It was unresponsive.
At first, I thought I had plugged it in incorrectly, but after plugging it in with every possible configuration yielded no results, I tried to plug it into the other cigarette lighter located on the back of the center console for the rear seat occupants.
Nothing.
At this point, I realized that it probably wasn’t user error. A brief internet escapade confirmed my worst fears: the fuse for the cigarette lighter was blown.
It turns out that my father (who owned this car before me) had picked up some ice cream from a drive thru about five months ago and allowed it to drip into the AC socket as it melted (to be fair, the restaurant had us waiting for nearly twenty minutes for the food, it wasn’t his fault that it began to melt). I was in the car with him, and tried to tell him what was happening. Upon realizing we didn’t have anything to wipe it up with, he basically shrugged it off and said “It’ll be alright. It will just dry, and we never use the ports anyway.”

Fast forward five months later, the car has since changed ownership to yours truly, and we are JUST NOW realizing that we basically shorted out the outlet system by allowing that to happen. To make matters worse, someone had apparently been into the fusebox before me, and the fuse removal tool that was supposed to come with the car was missing from the glovebox location, as shown here. I even checked the other fusebox under the hood, as shown here. (my car has four of them for some reason) to see if there was one in there, but that one was also missing, as shown here. We have two options: try to find a fuse kit at AutoZone that also comes with a fuse remover, or take it to the dealership and waste money having them do a job that I could have done myself in five minutes with spare fuses (or reusing a dormant fuse that went to an optional feature that my particular car doesn’t have, like heated rear seats) and the right tools. I spent quite literally all day troubleshooting this and trying to remove the fuse by hand, but ultimately failed.

I just want to get the camera to work dawg 🙏🏾😭

(Pictured is the dashcam when plugged into the aux port. It powers the unit, but puts the camera into data transfer mode, so it’s useless)