Dave Barry: Bad Habits

CALLER: Hello, Mr. Barry?

ME: No, this is Adolf Hitler.

CALLER: Of course. My mistake. The reason I’m calling you at eleven-thirty at night, Mr. Hitler, is that I’m conducting a marketing survey, and ...

ME: Are you selling magazine subscriptions?

CALLER: Magazine subscriptions?

ME: Selling them? Ha ha. No. Certainly not. Not at all. No, this is just a plain old marketing survey. (Sound of dogs barking in the background.) If you’ll just answer a few questions, we’ll send you a million dollars.

ME: Well, what do you want to know?

CALLER: Well, I just want to ask you some questions about your household, such as how many people live there, and what their ages are, and what their incomes are, and whether any of them might be interested in subscribing to Redbook?

ME: I don’t want to subscribe to anything, you lying piece of slime.

CALLER: How about Time? Sports Illustrated? American Beet Farmer?

ME: I’m going to hang up.

CALLER: No! (The dogs get louder.) Please! You can have my daughter!

ME: (Click.)

The first telephone was invented in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell attached a battery to a crude electrical device and spoke into it. Everybody thought he was an idiot. He would have died in poverty if Thomas Edison hadn’t invented the second telephone several years later.

The first telephone systems were primitive “party lines,” where everybody could hear what everybody else was talking about. This was very confusing:

BERTHA: Emma? I’m calling to tell you I seen your boy Norbert shootin’ his musket at our goat again, and if you don’t—

CLEM: This ain’t Emma. This is Clem Johnson, and I got to reach Doc Henderson, because my wife Nell is all rigid and foaming at the mouth, and if she don’t snap out of it soon the roast is going to burn.

EMMA: Norbert don’t even own a musket. All he got is a bow and arrow, and he couldn’t hit a steam locomotive from six feet, what with his bad hand, which he got when your boy Percy bit it, and which is festerin’ pretty bad.

DOC HENDERSON: You better let me take a look at it.

BERTHA: The goat? Oh, he ain’t hurt that bad, Doc. He’s mostly just skittery on account of the musket fire.

CLEM: Now she’s startin’ to roll her eyes around. Looks like two hard-boiled eggs.

EMMA: What kind of roast is it?

DOC HENDERSON: If it’S just skittery, you should stroke it a bit and keep it in a dark place.

EMMA: Well, I ain’t no doctor, but I ain’t never heard of stroking a roast.

CLEM: Only dark place we got is the barn, and I’d be afraid to put Nell in there on account of she’d scare the chickens.

BERTHA: Chickens ain’t a roast, Clem; chickens is poultry. Take ‘em out of the oven when you can wiggle the drumstick.

EMMA: I told you already, Norbert don’t even own a musket.

CALLER: Hi. I’m conducting a marketing survey. Is Mr. Hitler at home?

CLEM: No, but I’ll take a year’s worth of American Beet Farmer if you got it.

The party-line system led to a lot of unnecessary confusion and death, so the phone company devised a system whereby you can talk to only one person at a time, although not necessarily the person you want. In fact, if you call any large company, you will never get to talk to the person you’re calling. Large companies employ people who are paid, on a commission basis, solely to put calls on hold. The only exception is department stores, where all calls are immediately routed to whichever clerk has the most people waiting in line for service.

But we should never complain about our telephone system. It is the most sophisticated system in the world, yet it is the easiest to use. For example, my twenty-month-old son, who cannot perform a simple act like eating a banana without getting much of it in his hair, is perfectly capable of direct-dialing Okinawa, and probably already has. In another year, he’ll be able to order his own magazine subscriptions.

You should do your own car repairs. It’s an easy way to save money and possibly maim yourself for life.

You’re probably afraid to repair your car because you think cars are complicated. This is nonsense. Many teenage boys understand cars, and on any scale of intellectual achievement teenage boys rank right down there with newts. At least they did when I was one of them.

When I was in high school, we boys would stand out on the corner at lunchtime and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and spit frequently and guys would pull up in genuinely hideous-looking cars with the front ends jacked way up. They’d open the hoods and we’d stare inside and have conversations like this:

LOOKERS: Three eighty-nine?

DRIVER: Four twenty-seven.

LOOKERS: Fuel injected?

DRIVER: Headers.

LOOKERS: Dual?

DRIVER: Quad.

LOOKERS: Boss.

Then we’d all spit approvingly. Sometimes the conversation would turn ugly, particularly if some participants favored Fords and some favored Chevrolets. The Ford-Chevrolet conflict was a major issue, considerably more important to us than, say, the fate of the Free World. Those who favored Fords would yell “Fo Mo Co,” which is short for “Ford Motor Company.” Those who favored Chevrolets would yell “Fo No Go,” which is short for “Ford No Go.” This was considered a very witty insult. Sometimes fights would break out.

What I’m getting at is that we had the intellectual depth of lima beans, and we still managed to understand cars. So you can, too.

The trouble with most do-it-yourself car articles is they tell you how to do things you don’t really need to do, like change the oil. Most Such articles rave on for pages about changing the oil, as if it were some kind of sacred ritual, never once telling you how degrading and pointless it is. I have been driving for eighteen years, and I have never once had a car problem I could have solved by changing the oil. If the Good Lord had wanted us to change the oil, He would have put different oil in the car in the first place.

But if you believe the do-it-yourself articles, you traipse along, changing your oil regularly, and one day your car ceases to run, and you try changing the oil a couple more times, and it still doesn’t run, and you end up taking it to an auto mechanic, and you have this conversation:

You: What’s wrong?

MECHANIC: It seems to be either the transmission or the engine. (Translation: I’m not sure, so I plan to replace every part in the car.)

YOU: How long will it take to fix?

MECHANIC: We should have a pretty good idea by Friday. (“One hundred and sixty-two years.”)

YOU: How much will it cost?

MECHANIC: Well, I have to Check on some of the parts and labor, but figure about $130. (“Eight billion skillion dollars.”)

So what you need to know is how to do major car repairs, the kind most do-it-yourself articles don’t talk about. There are two major kinds of car problems, which we in the automotive community refer to as The Two Major Kinds of Car Problems:

What you do here is turn up the radio. If your car doesn’t have a radio, you can sing loudly as you drive. Some people try to deal with noise problems by messing around with the muffler, but I advise against this. Mufflers are filthy, disgusting objects covered with parts of every dead animal you have ever run over. I would no more touch a muffler than I would change my oil.

Generally these problems involve the engine, which is a large object you’ll find under your hood, unless you live in a high-crime area. Open the hood and poke around among the wires with a screwdriver, or, if you have no screwdriver, the tip of an umbrella. Have somebody sit in the car. As you poke, yell “Try it now” or “Okay, try it now.” This is how most professional mechanics solve engine problems. Before long you’ll be fixing cars as well as they do, by which I mean about 30 percent of the time.