Don’t judge me on my car
You can tell a lot about a person from the interior of their car. Since the big shift, it would be fair to say that my car innards have been on the seedy side, with the traffic of sand from towel, togs and toes further adding to the mayhem.
To my shame, I presented said car in its sullied state for a WOF (Warrant of Filth) and felt sorry for all those who had to enter it in the pursuit of road safety.
A friend says that whenever she’s given a hard time about the let-go interior of her car, she pretends that it’s only just been returned to her by one of her minging millennial offspring. That’s another reason why I should’ve remembered to have kids. Someone to blame after all those years of blaming the parents.
A couple of days later, I happened upon one of those reports specially designed to freak out the worried well. Apparently the germs on a car steering wheel have four more times the bacteria than your typical public toilet, ie 629 CFUs (colony-forming units), compared with 172 on a dunny seat. The cup holder is also a shocker, coming in at 506 CFUs; the seatbelt isn’t much better, scoring 403 CFUs; and you don’t want to know the score for a petrol pump handle. All right, if you must know, it’s approximately 2,000,000 CFUs.
The shock/horror report sprang this slacker into rushing out to her car with a hot soapy cloth to wipe down the steering wheel, the gearstick and a few other choice surfaces that have endured sneezes, snacks, and spilled fluids.
A couple of hours later, I found myself at a car wash with a passenger, who confessed she had never been through one before, on account of being too nervous about what the process might entail.
How quaint, I thought, as I reassured her that it was similar to your common or garden acid flashback as we entered Sudcity for total immersion. Minutes later, we drove out disorientated, our senses reeling from the thrubbing of rub-a-dubbers and hot air blades, only to find a finished product of birdstrike coated in unmentionable unguents.
Too impatient to queue again and ask for another go, we proceeded to the next station and threw everything out of the car – tent, eco shopping bags, combs, receipts, lost earrings, tissues, shells, hair, a Junior Temperance badge, a spanner, a cloven hoof (just kidding), etcetera, etcetera. Actually a whole lot of etcetera.
Madly feeding $2 coins into the machine, I grabbed the vacuum sucker nozzle and, with my traumatised pit-stop crew co-worker, we chucked the hose back and forth across the car between us, sucking the hell out of that carpet, till it looked just like a bought one.
And then we gathered up all the stuff. And we loaded it all back into the car as my inner trashhouse snickered, thinking: Good luck with that new order.
But, for a while there, boy it felt good. We even pumped up the tyres and drove out of that sorry yard with its card-only, pin-pad petrol bowsers, the car so light and happy it felt positively born again.
No doubt the car will remain in this semipristine state for a brief moment in time before it reverts to its usual midden. And when it does, I will explain it away as I usually do. The chaos within indicates high creativity and is overwhelming visual evidence of a rich interior life.
Who am I kidding? Just call me Jeff Lebowski.