Off the Grid: Mechanics and the art of evaporated worry

Although I like to think of myself as a competent interlocutor, I am not known for my ability to communicate effectively with mechanics.

I chalk it up to a lingering effect of the socio-cultural divide between the genders in which the assumption is that, because I am female, I cannot possibly understand cars.

While the latter may be true, it has nothing to do with my own parts or pronouns, rather, my preference for just about any other topic.

From the time I have owned a vehicle as a teenager, conversations with mechanics have been primarily me attempting to decipher grunts and shrugs, requesting for the umpteenth time they really do change out my tire sensors (“No, they’re fine, it’s ‘radio frequency interference,’ ma’am, ignore the light”), or making the most precise imitation of the sound I am hearing in my car.

“So it’s a ticking sound?”

“No, it’s a knocking sound.”

“You sure it’s not a pinging sound?”

“Yes. I suppose you could also say it is a clunking sound, one in which metal contacts against metal of a heavy sort, particularly when going over bumps or curves, on the right front only, subsequent to me launching my vehicle over a rock at high speed.”

“So you provoked the noise with your behavior?”

Rather than just drive my car around the block, my car and I are placed on the stand to affirm that, indeed, there is a noise and I am not just making it up.

“We’ll look into it,” says the man I could have birthed myself about the time I had my third vehicle.

I want to tell him I was changing oil, spark plugs and tires, and blowing up engines before he was in diapers, and that I got 100% on the eight-cylinder engine test in eighth grade and grew up maintaining generators to keep the lights on in my house.

I don’t need it looked into.

I need it fixed.

Maybe swap out those tire sensors while you’re at it, too.

The tire sensors: I have taken my car to the mechanic no less than five times to three places to have them examined.

I have a newer car and so everything has sensors. I have no idea how to change the oil on this sweetheart of a ride that basically drives itself.

It cannot, however, make up its mind as to whether my tires are low or not. And it seems wholly unperturbed by the knocking noise.

What is most remarkable about the tire sensors is that I have received a different explanation for their malfunction each time.

And each time, the explanation sounds more convincing than the last, delivered in the confident tone of a man certain I don’t know a thing about tires and even less about radio frequency technology.

Eventually, I had to just total my car and get a new one and those sensors are never bothered by any of the myriad unavoidable issues that plagued the previous ones (like the classic rock station).

After waiting several hours at the service center, slugging free coffee and hoping a salesman would take me for a spin in some fast new model (leading on salesmen in dealerships being a favorite of my pastimes – it’s how I balance the karma), the mechanic confirmed my car was indeed broken.

“So what was it?”

“It is the strut. We need to schedule a repair.”

I inquired as to whether it seemed like a good idea to repair it, you know, like right now as it was available and had been in their, ahem, expert care, for the last three hours.

Also, I intend on driving this car hundreds of miles next week. Was it not dangerous to drive like that?

No, he says. He tells me he thinks it is safe because they usually don’t let someone drive their car home if it is not safe.

Usually. I’m calmed by this because, apparently, the front suspension of my vehicle is like the appendix of the human body: It’s there, but no one is real sure why.

Of course, a bad appendix might muck up some other internal organs, which is true of a strut as well.

But the mechanic doesn’t try to explain this to me, presumably because I’m wearing a dress and must lack the vocabulary.

“I mean, it might make some noise,” he said, forgetting that the noise was why the car is sitting here in the first place.

Then he continued to help me understand why my concern should not be concerning, which is always such a relief.

Were it not for the sanitizing of our fears by those who were unafraid (or unaffected, should catastrophe strike), one can only guess what an anxious ball of unreasonable girlishness all us ladies would be.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted ammimarie@gmail.com