12.28.08
A Fool’s Errand
My car doesn’t look very nice. It’s covered in salt and dirt and soot from dirty snow that splashes and sprays up from the road in the winter time. So I decided to wash my car this morning.
Now if you were reading too closely, you would have noticed that I said my car *doesn’t* look very nice. Then I said I decided to wash it. So I should have said, “My car didn’t look very nice…So I decided to wash [it].” Hypothetically.
I looked out the window, and it was sunny if a little windy. I stepped outside and it was a little colder than I expected. No matter. While I didn’t relish the thought of plunging my hands into a bucket of ice-cold water on a cold, windy day, I chose not to abort the mission. I grabbed my bucket and sponge and chamois. Ha, I took my chamois.
I got to the self-service car wash and all the stalls were taken, so I waited. Popular day to wash your car I guess. Someone finished, so I maneuvered into the stall. I started to reach for my wallet, but it sounded like the pump was still going. I stepped out. Sure enough, three minutes left. Wow. I grabbed the wand and got to work, spraying with the high pressure rinse from top to bottom. The first thing I noticed was that the floor of the stall was a bit slippery. I saw some soap bubbles, so I thought maybe that was it. Then I realized it was ice. Then I looked at my car. It was unusually shiny and a little bit more…ripply than usual.
My car was now covered from top to bottom in an eighth-inch of ice. It was a giant black icicle. Being completely unprepared for this, I kept spraying, not quite sure what to do. Then it occurred to me that this response was neither logical nor helpful. I put the wand away just as the one minute warning went off. I drove out of the stall, keeping the door open so I could see, since the entire vehicle was now a blind spot.
I pulled into a parking space by the vacuums, turned the defroster on full blast, and got out my scraper–not my chamois. After working on the windshield for a minute or two, the side of the car in the sun had melted. Actually, it had sublimated, and was dry, and just as dirty and salty as before, while the side in the shade was as stubbornly frozen as when I’d pulled out of the stall.
I guess I got what I paid for with my free car wash.