Auto Repairs (In the Style of Bill Bryson)

by LegoGuyF10

The mechanic is a wonderful place to truly test your wits. Most offer you no thrills: no bottle of water upon arrival, no cushy arm chair to wait in, and certainly no soothing music. One of the very necessary aspects to settling down in a new place is to find a reliable mechanic. I decided on mine the old fashioned way, which is to say I picked the one that looked the most grimy, disorganized, and had the most old and junked cars in his back lot. I see these traits as a true barometer of the excellence that they put into their trade, for they are so busy with all of their loyal customers that they neglect small things like cleanliness and, to some degree, friendliness.

When my car first had an issue upon arriving in this new town, I had already been living here a month. I had not been in need of an oil change or any kind of routine maintenance of the like, so I had no reason to explore my wonderfully various options of those who would collect my money for holding onto my vehicle for a few days. Upon beginning my research, I saw that there were auto-repair, auto-body, and lube specialists. I found proprietors who claimed they could service my air conditioning, my transmission, or my muffler. There were garages specializing in foreign cars, domestic cars, and “wait, you would call that ridiculous thing a car?” cars.

Having grown up outside the United States, living in England for the past twenty years, I realized the general terminology used to be different in both areas. What I’d call a bonnet, someone here would call a hood, and if I wanted to store groceries, I’d put them in the boot, but a Yankee would probably put the bundles in the trunk. This difference in lexicon aside, I was still confident that I could get a simple repair done at the garage closest to my home, so I went there first to try and get a rough idle fixed.

"My good sir, I am having a great deal of trouble at junctions. The propulsion seems to want to cut out, so I must depress the fuel controller frequently to keep from interrupting the locomotive service of my automobile," I explained to the technician. He looked at me dumbfounded, and promptly pointed to the door which I had just walked in through; signaling to me that he would not serve me here. This was my first encounter with American automobile repair shops.