My first real interaction with a sleazy car mechanic came at the tender age of twenty-two. I was driving from Berkeley to Palo Alto in a 1987 hand-me-down Subaru and the engine blew up. It was my fault. Still at the age of automobile ignorance, I was lax, if not blatantly irresponsible, about upkeep. How was I to know that an engine can explode when it has no oil? They don’t teach you that in college.
With a loud pop, a lot of smoke, and a motionless car, I was quickly schooled in the outcomes of negligence.
A tow truck brought me to the closest repair shop and it took the mechanic about five minutes to sum up the situation. “It’s a goner; not worth fixing,” he told me. I didn’t really trust him, but I didn’t know enough to argue the diagnosis. His analysis was going to cost me $65 but he offered to purchase the car for $50. It seemed like a good enough deal to me. The next day I brought him the pink slip and paid him the difference of $15. There and then, I made a fateful mistake. Instead of sending in the pink slip myself, I assumed (never, ever assume with mechanics) that he would send it in. I cursed myself months later when I got a parking ticket from the Palo Alto police department for an abandoned car, then cursed myself again when I got a bill from a towing company that had been charging me $25 a day for storing my car.
“But it’s not my car, I sold it to the mechanic before all this happened,” I pleaded with my parents, who still had the car in their names.
It didn’t matter. When the mechanic didn’t send in the pink slip, the car remained in my parents’ name and everything thereafter remained my problem. More than $1000 later, I had learned my lesson.
Mechanics, like dentists, electricians, and Internet technologists, are individuals skilled in a field that the general public knows little about. They hold in their domain the ability to fix our most pressing functions: transportation, eating, illumination, and email. Sometimes, we seem at their mercy; with little knowledge of a subject, how can we dispute their claims? When someone repairs our car, how can we tell who is telling the truth and who is inventing an imaginary automobile ailment designed to drain our bank account and pad his own?
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