Automobile Agony

Towards the end of last week, the unthinkable happened. Oh no, no, I am not talking about Rahul Dravid finally getting a hundred before the spectators died of old age. The issue was a lot less exciting than that. I was about to leave for work when my car refused to start. Nothing worked inspite of me trying over and over again. Well, being an experienced IT professional, I applied the standard troubleshooting techniques. I took a break and had a cup of coffee.

Surprisingly, that did nothing. Apparently, automobiles don’t work the same way as softwares do.

So, I let my natural instinct that has evolved over millions of years to take over. You see, we men are born with an innate ability of understanding complex mechanics of machinery. I opened the hood of the car and peered inside and it immediately struck me what the problem was !!

That I was a pristine idiot when it came to automobiles. It was clear that my instincts had not evolved enough. I was looking at this lump of metal pipes with the same expression on my face that I had when I saw my 10th grade maths question paper or for that matter, my 9th or 8th or 7th…well, you get the idea.

But thankfully, my lack of automobile knowledge (and maths) has been duly compensated by my skill to give up easily. This way, I don’t waste too much time in trying to do things I don’t have a clue about (here again is proof that my male instincts need more work). I closed the hood and called the service guy.

The mechanic said he could only make it on the weekend. So I had to manage the next two days without my car.

So I was forced to borrow my uncle’s car. This was kind of scary because his was a brand new car with no scratches yet and I did not want to be the one to scar it. I was extra careful when driving it and made sure that I never went beyond 50 km/h, giving a chance to all the drivers to yell at me and make rude gestures when they passed me by (I wish when they close their car door, they slam it on their fingers).

But the worst part of the whole thing was that there was no radio in the car which meant that, yep that’s right, * I * had to sing the whole time !!. And unlike a radio, I could not even switch stations to shut me up and ended up enduring my singing all through.

Two days passed by, it was Saturday and the mechanic came over. The problem was with the car battery which had conked out and had to be replaced.

So finally, I have my car back, it feels great to have the freedom to drive the way I want, to have the liberty to scratch or dent or bang up my car. I can speed up whenever I want to

But most importantly, I can now turn on the radio…