A lot of people don't know very much about cars. I am one of them. First of all, I'm not a very good driver. I can't see well and I have bad depth perception. As a result, I don't particularly like doing it. That, added to my lack of knowledge, lends itself to one clueless driver. My sister isn't much better. She's been known to pull hanging pieces from our cars because they don't look important.
Anyway, this week I was sitting in the Goodyear by my school, waiting for them to change the four BALD tires on my car. I was waiting for them to do the alignment and all that jazz thinking about how clueless I am. I can't change a tire, I can't check my oil, I barely know how to add windshield wiper fluid to my car. BUT, the one thing I do know how to do is pop the hood.
Whenever relatively common situations arise- your car isn't starting, a door that should be open is locked, you have a weird stomachache- there are certain "first response" reactions that every person has (especially when they don't really know what they're talking about). When a door is locked, that reaction is to jiggle the handle. I don't know about you, but very rarely has jiggling the handle opened a locked door. Still, it's the socially acceptable thing to do. Whenever you call someone and say, "Help, my door/cabinet/toilet flappy thing won't open" they will respond, "Well, did you jiggle the handle?" For stomachaches, it's going to the bathroom. You could be pregnant and going into labor, and if you told someone who was not aware of the whole pregnancy thing, they would probably answer with, "Maybe you should try going to the bathroom."
For cars, that response is to pop the hood. This one is funnier than those I just mentioned because popping the hood has absolutely NO effect on how your car is running. At least OCCASIONALLY going to the bathroom or jiggling the handle MIGHT do the job, but popping the hood (ONLY popping the hood) will not. Because it is so useless as a strategy to fix cars, of course it is the one that I employ first.
Just to reiterate, I know NOTHING about cars. You could tell me my car's rotary cuff was fractured and I'd believe you. You could tell me my gas tank was infested by flies who were laying eggs of mutant babies and I'd believe you. You could tell me that my license plate was slowing down my acceleration because of the angle it was screwed on and- yep- I'd believe you.
My sister is kind of the same way. Her calling card is to call my parents in the midst of whatever car catastrophe she is having, hoping that my dad's quick thinking will get her out of it. When we get together, it's even worse. We had to drive to Ohio over the summer to move her stuff back home and one of those things was her queen size mattress and box springs. We had about 300 feet of rope and my dad's truck, so we were set to get everything tied down and ready to go.
Big mistake, assuming that we could complete this task without messing up. I'm a pretty intelligent person, but tying knots is not one of my strengths. Combine that with my sister's stellar critical thinking skills (that was a jab, Kris) and you've got a recipe for disaster (aka an SUV getting destroyed by a mattress that flew off a truck with a New York license plate... that didn't really happen but it could have). Our strategy was to wrap the ropes around the little rope-holder things as many times as possible, taking extra safety measures of weaving that same rope through various other pieces of furniture, tying sporadic knots along the way. Our catch phrase was, "What are the odds that ALL these knots/tangles come undone at the same time?"
Needless to say, we ended up making it about an hour (about 20 miles) before turning around and coming back so that some former boy scout guy friend of hers could properly secure the mattress. This is after we were parked at the side of the road by an abandoned building, covered in mud and ropeburns, after my sister nearly got run over on the highway when she got out of the car to retrive the top that flew off one of her plastic storage bins, after a man in another truck looked at the leaning mattress and flapping tarp with a look of apocalyptic panic in his eyes.
Kristin's responses in these emergency situations is to call my father. Example: she ran out of gas at an intersection. "Dad, I have no gas and people are beeping at me." She saw something weird hanging out the bottom of our van on a road trip and pulled it off (as I said at the beginning of this post). "Dad, was that okay? Now the heat only works in the left side." She didn't have any money for a toll on one of the NY interstates. "Dad, what do I do?"
My response, on the other hand, is to pop the hood. I think that's a pretty common thing for people to do. The problem is that popping the hood is merely a step in LOOKING at what's inside the hood. The only thing I can say once I've completed that is, "Yup, there's an engine in there." Even that's a stretch, because engines and the inside of refrigerators probably look pretty similar. I just think it's funny how much people rely on those first common reactions when they hardly ever result in something productive happening.
Thankfully, I have my dad to take care of that stuff, to walk me through baby steps of figuring out what is wrong and then handing over his Goodyear credit card to get it fixed. If it were up to me, I'd be driving down the highway with no gas and the check engine light on, my sister in the passenger seat trying to pay tolls with Canadian dimes, and one of the tires completely missing off the back passenger axle.
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