Taking myself to the cleaners
Usually, I’m the only person that uses my car. If Sue uses it, it takes me three days to get the thing back to normal. Well, normal for me. She’s jiggled the rearview mirror, she’s moved the side mirrors, she’s tuned the radio to the “Best Hits of 1754,” and thrown away some very important notes.
“How can you stand the noise from all those empty soda bottles rolling around in your back seat?” she said.
“I had a note to return them on the back of an empty Donut Hut bag, but you threw it away.”
“There were 40 of them.”
“And each one had an important note to myself on it.”
“Was one of those notes, ‘Lose some weight?'”
The only thing worse than having my wife borrow the car is having other people in the car. I’m supposed to take a few neighbors on a short road trip tomorrow, and I don’t want them to think I’m a slob so I have to clean the thing out.
I’ve been meaning to wipe that “Please Wash Me” sign off the back window for months. And whatever that stuff is on the passenger side floor that looks like used kitty litter should probably be scooped up. And the bottles. And that green thing in that grayish bag. That can’t be normal.
Time for a trip to the do-it-yourself car wash. The first thing you have to do yourself is find four quarters. The car wash change machine doesn’t work, and I didn’t know how to fix it myself. As I remember, it was broken the last time I was here, two months ago — give or take 22 months. Anyway, I won’t bore you with how hard it is to get four quarters when you need them. Let’s just say there was an unpleasant scene at the grocery store, at the coin-op laundry, at the drugstore and at several fast food restaurants. A beggar on Main Street finally took pity on me and gave me six quarters for two dollars. I think he probably works for the car wash.
At home, of course, I have hundreds, maybe thousands of quarters. There are some in every drawer I open, they are in jars all around the house, they are in yesterday’s pants’ pockets, they are in the laundry room where Sue fishes them out of the washer. If I bothered to look, I’d probably find some in the fridge. Not to mention all the usual places, under the sofa cushions, taped to the tone arm of an old record player, in every coat and jacket pocket.
“They’ve got a machine at the grocery store,” I told Sue, “Where you throw in all your change and you get real money back.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “It’s highway robbery. They keep 10 percent of it.”
“Unlike our furniture, which keeps 100 percent of it,” I wanted to say, but it came out, “Oh, yeah, what was I thinking? Of course, you’re right.”
At last, ready to go, I put four quarters into the do-it-yourself, gigantic car-cleaning vacuum cleaner. The thing was the size of soda vending machine.
It roared into action — it sounded like a 747 taking off. I’d be lucky if it doesn’t suck the seat covers off, though. I put the nozzle to the carpet in front of my passenger’s seat where there was a small, annoying piece of tissue the size of a fingernail clipping. The vacuum cleaner didn’t pick it up. For all the noise, for all the four quarters, it suckethed not.
Not only was the vacuum not picking up any dirt, it was starting to add dirt to my car. Small clouds of dark grey dust were coming out of the vacuum cleaner hose.
“If you would like me to stop blowing the previous customer’s dirt into your car, please deposit three quarters, now,” I expected the voice to say next.
There was no one around to complain to. That’s the worst part of doing-anything-yourself: Complaining to yourself. I’m going to write myself a nasty note about my crappy service. Where’s that Donut Hut bag?
Jim Mullen can be reached at [email protected].