Being a Car Idiot
I recently failed my emissions test. In Illinois we are pretty lenient when it comes to this stuff. You only have to take the test once every five years. In Missouri you also have to get some kind of safety inspection. If you don’t pass that then you have to get your car fixed about a zillion times and only then can you get the little sticker for your license plate. In Illinois you just pay the state some money and they send you the sticker. Money works in Illinois and don’t let anyone ever tell you any different.
We do have the emissions test, though. I had been having problems with the car check engine light on my dashboard since the beginning of the year. I took it in once and they told me there was some kind of leak in the fuel line. They wanted to know if I could leave the car with them for a longer period of time. Considering I had been forced to sit in their waiting room watching the first episode of last seasons “American Idol” I already felt like I had been letting them have their way with my car for roughly eighty-seven years. I made promises saying I would bring the car back and then I never did.
See, I tend to need my car. I tend to need it every day. Call me crazy but I have to work a job and I have to get to an office to do this job and that means being able to travel from where I live to where I work and then back home again. So, leaving the car there for any great length of time is difficult.
None of this need be as difficult as it is if I just knew anything about cars. Cars were just never interesting to me. I never thought they looked that cool. I never had dreams of owning a sports car. I always liked airplanes. When I was in my model-building phase, I was the one building World War I bi-planes and not model cars. All that technical stuff was boring to me. All those wires did not look like fun or anything interesting it looked messy and confusing and boring as all hell.
So, I never learned how to fix cars. I learned how to change a tire. I know how to put oil and gas into the thing. I know how to check the oil. I can even refill the windshield-washing fluid all by myself and with only a minimum of spillage.
This means I am at the mercy of the mechanics. I think they can usually smell blood in the water like great white sharks around a boat that’s chumming. Usually the mechanic sees me and, after three seconds, an evil smile crosses his face. He knows he has a sucker.
They use words that make no sense to me. I try to act like I know what they are talking about and I nod and act like I am an expert. I don’t think they buy it. The thing is that I have no idea what they are talking about. They could be making up words entirely and I would still be there, hand on my chin, nodding like I knew what they meant.
“Yes, well your flibberty-jibbet is whanging against the flogger stomper,” the mechanic might say, pointing to some indecipherable scribble on a piece of paper.
“Yes,” I would reply nodding, hand on chin, “you can’t have a whanging flibberty-jibbet.”
The mechanic would then smile and hand me a bill for three grand.
This happened a few years back when my car started overheating for no foreseeable reason. We kept bringing it back to the car dealership. They kept fixing and replacing things and then telling me it was fixed and then as soon as I took the thing on the highway the temperature gauge would bang way over to the right. Finally we complained enough and then a manager took a look at the thing.
“There’s a crack in the solenoid head,” he said.
“Yes,” said I. “One must have an uncracked solenoid head.”
What the hell is a solenoid? He made that word up, right? He got that from the Transformers cartoon or something, didn’t he?
So I recently brought the car in to get the fuel line fixed. Sure enough the mechanic smiled two seconds after he saw me. He started writing indecipherable things on his pad of paper. He disappeared into a back room where I imagine he and a bunch of other mechanics laughed maniacally like super villains.
“Yes, I need to purge the solenoid,” he says when he calls back the next day.
There was that word again. Solenoid. It was like he knew that I would buy that this was an actual thing. Sure, of course you have to purge the solenoid. Why wouldn’t you? Everyone should have purges solenoids, shouldn’t they? Anyone would know that.
Of course, I am paying the bill. I just shove a pile of money at them and let them make up all the words they want. There’s no use fighting it. I wouldn’t know a solenoid from a flibberty-jibbet and they know that. I am totally at their mercy.
But some day, I am going to get those damn solenoids. I think they live in a commune somewhere near Fresno.
