learning to speak mechanicese

My car was back in the shop for an assortment of maladies. It’s no longer a ‘young’ car and, in its old age, has become quite cranky and persnickety. Therefore, a tune-up was long overdue.

I dropped my car off and called the following afternoon for an update on its health. One of the mechanical MDs told me, “we just ordered the parts for it. They should be in tomorrow morning.”

Which left me wondering where these parts were coming from? And, being that they were ordered late in the afternoon, how are they going to be delivered early the next morning? Is my car so very important that my parts were expressed delivered overnight, straight from some part making shop in China? Do mechanics know some secret to the universe which allows them to bend the rules of time and space? Or, by ‘ordering parts’ do they mean that Eugene needs to walk to the back of the garage and pick them up off of a shelf? I’m guessing that this is probably what they meant.

And judging from what these parts cost me…$250 for some spark plugs and wires…Eugene must have had one far walk in order to retrieve these parts of mine. They might have also been very high up on the shelf, thus adding to my total expense.

I’d like to think that the high dollar value of these spark plugs and wires were due to the fact that they were truly exceptional parts…parts that were guaranteed to greatly improve the performance of my car. Or possibly that they were gold plated. But being that my car still doesn’t work right, I question the durability of the parts. And I highly suspect that there’s no gold plating either. Basically, I think I’ve been screwed.