Tuesday, December 14, 2010

I am not making this up

When I pulled my husband’s car out of the garage on Sunday morning, it made a horrible screeching noise as I was backing up.  Uh oh!  Sounds like brake work is needed.  I pulled forward again, but didn’t hear the screeching.  Backed up, heard it again.  It was loud!  So I went and got My Man because since the Third Century, that’s what a woman is trained to do when the car is making a noise.

He came down, and I gesticulated haplessly at the car.  But he was in his slippers, and preferred to listen from the doorway while I went out and drove the car back and forth to demonstrate the nefarious noise.  I did, but the car purred like a kitten.  So my husband had the privilege of saying to me, “I don’t hear anything,” which is what husbands have been saying to their wives since the Third Century.  I had to admit that I didn’t hear anything either.  So I drove off to church, and the car hasn’t made that noise since then.

I also have okay eyesight. I can tell when there is water dripping from the garbage disposal.  It happened several times last week, and I saw it with my own eyes.  So of course, being a Third Century housewife, I told my husband about it.  He called the plumber and started researching garbage disposal prices. We even had a date at Home Depot to window shop in the garbage disposal section. But the plumber couldn’t come right away.  On my husband’s part, doubt set in. He ran the garbage disposal himself.  No dripping.  And it hasn’t dripped since then.

Today I was out running errands.  I spent over an hour in Target, leaving my poor car to shiver in the windy, snowy parking lot.  This is a different car than the car in paragraph 2, but it must have heard that the joke was on. When I was done, I started to drive home, and noticed a light on the dashboard.  The light was shaped like an elephant foot with an exclamation point inside of it. I wisely continued to drive home, since stopping to look at the car would mean freezing my tailbone off, and I didn’t see any elephants.

I got home, pulled the car in the garage, and phoned my husband, sighing in a Third-Century-woman sort of way.  He agreed that I needed to get it fixed.  But first, I decided to look up the elephant-foot symbol in the car manual.  It turns out it is the “Low Tire Pressure” indicator.  When this light comes on you are supposed to pull over immediately to check your tire pressure.  Oops.  In the dim garage light, I looked at the tires with my keen eyesight, and saw nothing wrong with them.

I am expecting that my husband will come home, drive the car, and the light will go off.   And he will get to say the other thing that husbands have said to their wives since the Third Century:  “It’s all in your head, dear.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Men and maintenance....it's a centuries old struggle, isn't it?