For the past few weeks, my minivan has been making this nasty clunking sound whenever it goes over a bump in the road. My husband also said it sounded as if it was grinding something. I'll take his word for that. I only heard the horrific clunking. I thought long and hard about whether the car would make the trip to visit my family later on in the week, and decided I would rather wake up at an awful hour Saturday morning to try and have a local mechanic take a look first and see if it was just a simple fix. I was really hoping there was just some piece of metal that had wiggled loose that needed to be tightened up underneath the car.
My husband wisely volunteered me to be the one to go to the mechanic. Granted, there is sometimes the stereotype that mechanics take advantage of ignorant females and charge us for things that we really did not need to have done. He's not smart for letting me be the one to seek help. He is brilliant, however, because he got to stay under the nice, warm covers and sleep while I had to go off bright and early to describe cranky car noises to mechanics whose eyes lit up with dollar signs once they heard my description of the problem.
I was the only female on the premises. After forking over my keys and signing my life away, I plunked myself down behind the safety of a divider where I could open my book and attempt to read. After just a short while, I heard the resident males congregating around the check-in desk. They were teasing the youngest guy there and told him he needed to get a girlfriend. One of them piped up with the sage advice to "Find some girl and get her liquored up. Then do all sorts of unmentionable things to her." Those were his exact words. I am not paraphrasing. However, before the other men could chime in about what sort of "unmentionable things" should be done, I left the safety of the divider. I walked over to them and very quietly told them that I had no idea who just made that statement, but it was very bad advice. None of them made eye contact with me. One of the mechanics immediately chimed in to agree with me at how poor that advice had been. Then, as I walked back to my seat behind the divider, a deathly silence fell. I think I successfully managed to mortify them.
Note to future young men of dating age: I am the mother of two girls. Don't even think of trying to get them drunk to have your way with them. That's a surefire way of getting yourself arrested, which kind of puts a damper on a potential relationship. Heck, I would even turn my son in to the police if I heard he ever pulled such a stunt to a young lady. There is no excuse for such behavior.
Anyway, shortly thereafter, the mechanic who had piped up to agree with me came over to tell me the bad news (for me) about my car. I will give him credit for not gloating as he delivered the news that it was the rack and pinion that was causing the problem. This meant nothing to me. He then explained what a rack and pinion does. To the best of my understanding, it sucks the money out of my checkbook. This is not a happy thing to have done. (For those now wanting to google what it really does, it has something to do with the power steering. If some sort of mystery fluid leaks out, which was what was starting to happen, I would have had to hire a bodybuilder just to turn the dang steering wheel. I like my power steering and would miss it terribly should such an event occur.)
To sum up, it would take about four hours to fix, and far more money than we had wanted to spend. The mechanic nicely volunteered to drive me home and then pick me up again once the car was fixed. I suspect this had to do with the desire to get me out of their shop, both from mortification and so the other men could come up with new ways to try and get their youngest worker arrested without me interfering with their grand plan.
So that's what happened. The car now sounds a bit different, and I cannot figure out if this is merely a sound that had been there before that we simply couldn't hear over the loud clunking, or perhaps the mechanics took our their embarrassment by finding something devious to do to my car. The nasty clunking has disappeared, but for all I know, they duct-taped something back up in place, killed four hours, and then charged me an outrageous price. The mechanics clearly won in this epic battle.
Next time, I'm volunteering my husband for this joyous task.
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