DAY AT THE CAR WASH!!!!

It starts when your wife tells you that you seem to have become negative over the last week. Negative? Well, I don’t think so. Me?  Of all people???

But, actually it does seem that many things have gone awry lately, maybe I am a little down. Just because my back aches, and I broke a bottle of liquid on the garage floor while getting the groceries out of the car, and… yeah… there is the computer virus someone is trying to implant in my laptop, and… well about a thousand other things.

But, the GOOD news is that the new automated car wash in Palm Coast Florida has lots of suds!! I found out as I tried out the new place which is pretty much completely automated after the initial mirror check and bug removal at Stage 1.  

It is terrific…  You pay for the automated car wash with a credit card device, pull up to the front of the line where two young guys are standing. As you reach the red line, these “almost eager”  workers jump into action. They start washing the bugs off of the front of the car, make sure your side mirrors are retracted, give a special wash to the windshield. Then they direct you to put car in neutral… foot off of the brake…and … the car rolls forward into the wash bay.

Being the gracious and entertaining fellow that I am, I have the driver’s side window down while the attendants do their job regaling them with some old jokes and friendly comments. Then they finish their work and we move on. AND, at that moment… that particular moment… the driver’s side electric window, for the first time EVER, refuses to go up.

As I frantically wrestle with the offending button, we roll quickly into the car wash, tons of suds washing over and into the car. As the panicking occupant (that would be me!!) wrestles with modern technology, an electric window which having only a two way button is not overly complex, about 1,000 gallons of water and soap suds are poured into the car by a completely unsympathetic automated process which I am guessing gets a perverse kick out of dousing the cheap customer who opted for the low cost wash instead of the $50 FULL SERVICE with hot wax and whitewall tire cleaner. 

As the water and suds flowed in covering the dashboard, the seat, most of the interior AND… the driver, I am almost positive I heard a faint electronic “chuckle coming from the mechanism !!!

Now, having been recently admonished by a certain wife who is ALWAYS correct, and remembering well her exact words about my being negative, I started to laugh!! I laughed with suds on my face and in my mouth, suds on my shirt and pants, suds on my head, suds in my lap and all over the inside of the car, water streaming in as if I was under Niagara falls.

I FINALLY got a little cooperation and the window suddenly went up just as it dawned on me that the window problem might relate back to an incident some months ago when a foolishly placed cup of soft ice cream slid off of the dash board onto the window button unit as I, oblivious to the danger, accelerated and the ice cream went flying. 

I learn a hard lesson, apparently! But to show that I am NOT negative, TODAY I laughed uncontrollably all the way through the car wash.

As the car rolled out of the bay I smugly thought, “That’ll show her!! Who is negative? Certainly not me!!! “ And then as if to offer one last humiliation, a big blob of soapsuds fell off my head into my lap.

As I pulled off the car wash lot I thought, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling: “If you can laugh while all those around you are not laughing, you probably don’t understand the situation.” :::sigh:::

It isn’t easy being me.