HUMOUR

Ndumiso Ngcobo’s mechanic panic

Here’s a riddle for you. What smokes like the Tamu Massif volcano, has a matchstick perpetually protruding from the corner of its mouth, a constantly exposed posterior cleft the width of the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, the reliability of a French car, the truthfulness of Joseph Goebbels and the punctuality of a Metrorail train on the Mamelodi to Pretoria Central route? Give up? Let me take you out of your misery. I have just described a mash-up of all the car mechanics I have ever encountered.

Every time the “2 000km to next service” message appears on my dashboard, there’s the daily countdown each time I insert the key into the ignition. The following day: “1 900km to the next service”. Last week Sihayo, my last-born, looked at me with grave concern when I started the car and yelled at the dashboard: “I know! I know, okay?!” The source of my anxiety? I’m obviously out of the shield of the maintenance plan. That means mechanics. And if you gave me an option between voluntarily dealing with a mechanic and having my nostrils plucked out with a nail clipper, my response would be: “Okay, but sterilise the nail clipper first.”

I do about 100km a day, so when I get the 2 000km notification I know I need to phone my guy. For some reason spanner jockeys all seem to have at least seven numbers — even though they all own one R199.95 Nokia handset whose greatest feature is that bright torch. You know, the torch they shine into the belly of the engine before they make you bleed through your wallet. SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter DM and all other forms of modern communication seem to have slipped past the parallel universe called Greasetopia because they remain unanswered. Finally, on the ninth day, with the car aggressively telling you: “You’re now 1 100km from your next service!”, he’ll pick up. From his out-ofbreath grunt, you can surmise he’s on his back, under a car. Because you’re an eternal optimist, you try to pin him down to a date and time, parameters essential in confirming an appointment in our universe. No such luck. “Just bring the car any time and we’ll have a look.”

You arrive at his premises, usually in the shady part of a town like Germiston, opposite a Universal Kingdom of God Church and adjacent to an Adult World sex-toy shop. You stand in the workshop for 23 minutes while he hammers away at the engine of a 1981 Mercedes. Then he walks slowly towards you, wiping fingers the size of pork bangers on a “cloth” that was a Ferodo Brakes freebie T-shirt in its previous life, simultaneously chomping on a matchstick, with a halfsmoked Courtleigh between the top of his ear and his skull. Without pleasantries, he yanks your bonnet open and instructs you to switch the engine on and rev it. “No china, not that hard!” Again, he says. I have learned the rules of this rigmarole. If, after you switch off the engine, he shakes his head, lets out a whistle longer than five seconds and yells “Jeeerr!”, start budgeting for more than R5 000. If he asks you to start the engine again and goes: “My friend, you’ve got beeg problems here,” you’re screwed. You might as well call your bank on the spot for an emergency R30 000 loan.

This is where mechanics are different from doctors. Doctors assume all patients are stupid so after they peer inside your mouth, ears and split your butt cheeks and shine a torch in there, they scribble illegible scrawls in your file and leave you there wondering: “Is it cancer? Is it syphilis?” Mechanics don’t assume you’re stupid. They know for a fact you’re an ignoramus, so they go about talking gibberish to you for their amusement. After three minutes of a monologue about gaskets, reboiling, crankshafts, bearings and whatnot, you ask: “So what am I looking at?” This is when Japie whips out a tiny, tattered notebook and starts scribbling furiously with a pencil half the length of a teaspoon, intermittently punching figures into a ginormous calculator. And then he turns the screen of the calculator towards you: “And that’s before my labour, my friend.” Your saliva thickens and in a highpitched voice you ask: “How much for labour?”, inevitably answered with: “This is a beeg job because I have to strip the entire engine.”

But what can you do? He’s standing there with outstretched hand and you meekly surrender yours.

If he shakes his head, lets out a whistle and yells ‘Jeeerr!’, start budgeting for more than R5 000