The De-evolution of Auto Mechanics or How I Drove Those Silly Bastards at the Auto Place Insane

So one day I was minding my own business when my husband, He Who Shall Remain Nameless For the Remainder of This Blog, or Him, or HIM if I'm feeling particularly sassy, asked me to take his truck into an auto place to have the tires rotated. Since having tires rotated on his 1996 Ford F-150 Truck is a mandated chore on my wifely duties list, (See future upcoming blog about that, btw) I agreed to the task, thinking, 'No problem. I'll take it in. Manly men will put it up on one of those thingys that raise it up in the air (I'm hearing imaginary lewd comments everywhere). I'll hear air tools whirring and chirping. Tires will be rotated. I'll read my book. No problem.'

I made an error. How simple can I put that? I made a boo-boo. I goofed. I fell for the oldest trick in the book. HIM, Who Shall Still Remain Nameless and the individual to whom I'm married, took the agreement in stride, and THEN started with the amendments. I'm thinking that the amendments should have been ratified by each state in the USA by a 2/3rds vote because that's how thrilled I was about them. But I had already agreed to the duty and by God, I was going to follow through.

The amendments: 1. I shall drive the coveted, babied Ford to the auto place and I shall not slam the doors. (For some reason I couldn't seem to shut the doors on this vehicle without irritating HIM's sensibilities. I didn't think I was slamming the door. HIM did. HIM would have thought an infant was slamming those doors.) 2. I shall tell the auto mechanics to rotate the tires on the vaulted truck slash vehicle of the Gods, and lament them not to slam the doors (HIM didn't really tell me to tell them not to slam the doors but I'm sure it was implied.) 3. I shall tell them to rotate the wheels in the order that HIM has so designated. 4. I shall not deviate from the designation of the designated tire rotation that HIM has decreed. HIM has marked the tires so that HIM will know that it was done in the method that HIM has declared. (No, HIM didn't really mark the tires, but HIM did memorize the markings on all the tires, so he would know.) Tire no. 1, otherwise known as the left front driver's side tire, shall go to tire position no. 4, otherwise known as the right rear driver's side. Tire no. 4 shall go to tire no. 2 position, otherwise known as front right passenger's side. Tire no. 3, otherwise known as left rear driver's side, shall go to somedamn place that I can't remember and I'm not sure I want to remember, and the rest of the tires went someplace, but HIM knew. 5. I shall explain HIM's decree to the auto mechanics. 6. I shall also tell the auto mechanics that they must not use air tools to tighten the lug nuts. (For the less than mechanically savvy, this means, the auto mechanics were supposed to tighten the lug nuts by hand. Obviously some of the single mechanics would be better at this than the married ones, but I might be making a faulty assumption.) 7. I shall bring the vehicle back to HIM and present it to HIM in a condition better than when I was entrusted to this mighty task.

And the OCD t-shirt I got for HIM is under appreciated.

My second mistake was actually relating HIM's instructions to the receiving person at the auto place. Let's call him Fred. Fred was actually one of the mechanics and well aware of what went on in the store. A lot of oil changes, tire changes, tune ups, tire rotations, alignments and the like were the average fare here. So here comes the short, fat, middle aged woman with a set of Ford keys and a look of contrite dismay on her face. (For the wifely one doesn't really want issue forth HIM's directions because she knows that she is the one who is going to sound like a big, fat, braying jack ass.) But I did it.

So I told the poor bastard, Fred, what HIM wanted. And the look on Fred's face went something like this.

So Fred looked at me with this expression on his face. I don't think he was comprehending the magnitude of what I was asking. He was taking it in, but he couldn't quite get it. Or perhaps his neurons and dendrites were misfiring on account of the fact that he comprehending what I was saying but he didn't understand why I was demanding that it should be so. As I stood there waiting for Fred's poor, misbegotten, untried brain to function to its full capacity (which was a lot longer in blog time) his face kept getting longer and longer. Words came out of his mouth but they didn't finish.

"Ba-bah-ba-bah-ba-bah," Fred said.

At that moment I knew that Fred had de-evolutionized and was becoming apelike. I was certain that he was about to start jumping up and down and throwing his own feces in his utter and absolute confused state of being. I was responsible for this poor miserable bastard having a psychosomatic meltdown into primateship. (I had to look that word up in the dictionary and I do mean the BIG, I-could-kill-someone-if-I-hit-them-over-the-head dictionary.) After much oral repetition I actually got the auto place to do what I had been designated to do.

I was banned from the auto place (Or at least they put my name in permanent marker on the 'bad' book they keep in the back. I'm pretty sure.)