Down at the car wash...

RedbeardSM submitted 595 days ago

Actually, I never got to hear the two "magic words," which is unfortunate as that was my goal.

I once worked at a car wash. Horrible job. People brought in rolling trash piles and expected miracles. I'm talking live roaches in the car. :eek: Nasty stuff.

After getting fed up with the owner's son (who was the manager and my immediate boss, working at what I presume to be the only job he could get), I thought I'd see what it took to get fired.

One morning I was working in "the pit" (where the cars were washed) with another guy while the manager's "pets" were outside vacuuming. When we'd get ahead, we'd go help vacuum. When they'd get ahead, they'd sit down and chat. About noon, I decided I'd eat lunch. After we got 4 or 5 cars ahead of the vacuumers, I started to eat my sandwich. The boss came out and saw that I wasn't helping his "pets," so he told me to "eat lunch between cars." So, I picked up my sandwich, walked over in between two cars, and resumed eating. :cool: He failed to see the humor. But I still didn't get fired. :confused: I needed to step it up a bit.

This guy came in for a wash. He told me not to close the car with the keys inside, since his alarm system automatically locked the doors. A light went on in my head. I vacuumed his car very thoroughly, since I felt bad about what I was about to do to him. I pulled the car around to the pit, and onto the roller frame. Instead of the usual procedure of putting the car in neutral so the roller can pull the car through the automatic wash, I put it in park. I then exited the vehicle, leaving the keys in the ignition. Again feeling bad for the customer, I washed his car thoroughly. When I hit the button for the roller to pop up and pull the car, and it caught ahold of his front wheel and pulled, the alarm started going off. (Recall that the car was in park and would not move, so the roller was just jerking the car.) The customer had no way to stop the alarm, since his only remote (and only set of keys) was securely locked inside his vehicle. We couldn't push the car out of the way, since the parking brake was on. Even better was the fact that the locksmith whose van we washed daily for free in exchange for unlocking doors was on call in another town, and couldn't get to the car wash for about 4 hours. That meant 4 hours of no cars being washed (since that one was immovable and blocking the way) and of listening to the alarm. At that point, I was told to go home for the day, and they'd call me when they needed me to come in again. (This in itself was not unusual for this place.) For some reason, that call never came. :confused: