I've lucked out...my truck has only stuck me twice. Once during the summer...the weirdest thing, I just got my paycheck, turned right out of the parking lot, and stood on it, to get ahead of the rush-hour traffic. All is fine and dandy...until it comes time for the 1-2 shift. Instead of the normal barking tires...it shuts off. Just completely dead. The worst part is that my starter solenoid picked right then to be too weak to do anything about it...yeah, not fun. A nice guy in a Honda decided to offer his car to push me...poor guy probably sacrificed 10,000 miles of clutch life to help me off the road!
The second time, I'd been having increasingly bad idle problems (eventually traced to dirt in the carb that was causing extreme richness at idle) and one day, at the top of an offramp, I figured it'd warmed up enough that I didn't need to two-foot it...nope, wrong. Sputtered, coughed, and died...took five minutes of on-and-off cranking before it finally roared back to life (with two huge clouds of black smoke). One guy even offered me his cell to let me call my dad...
I'd say you did good. I'd have a hard time not kicking out a headlight of hers if I had that said to me. I'd at least have said something to the extent of not wasting my signifigant other's money on a piece of junk like that.
