my car, incompetence, and boys

my mentor and I have had some random conversations over the years. Several of them have involved romantic relationships (or the lack thereof in my life). My mentor has told me that I need to show a little more incompetence (something about this making me less intimidating or illustrating how I might need a male in my life – though I might be misrepresenting him here as his reasoning has been mixed up with other’s comments)…

So to prove that I'm learning a bit more about incompetence, let me tell you the recent story of my car. (and acknowledging my incompetence in public helps me to be more humble, as i tend to participate only in things that i do well at, which leads to unnecessary ego inflation).

It all started on the birthday of one of my roommates. As we left to go out I discovered that I couldn’t really turn the steering wheel. So I added more power steering fluid and wondered how my power steering had gone from a squeaky noise that had appeared only the other day to being so low as to be useless. i also wondered whether the puddle under my car was really from my car and related to this.

So the next day, I got a friend to help me look at my car as the puddle under my car was definitely new enough and large enough to be part of the problem. He first asked me if I’d checked the fluids in my car. My answer was… “Uhhh, no.” [there were mitigating circumstances as I couldn’t get into my trunk for two months (my second set of keys won’t open the trunk and the first set had visited Saskatoon for a month and then I’d lent my car out to a friend for a few weeks and couldn't really check the trunk then) and I drive the car infrequently enough that I usually don’t check the fluids except before long trips, which I hadn’t done for three and a half months… ‘my poor car’ is all I can say].
As he asked about the fluids, I felt a bit incompetent – checking the fluids is the most obvious thing to do when trying to figure out what’s wrong with a car. And when I looked in the engine coolant overflow jug, I noticed it was empty. I felt like an idiot! My father taught me better than to let it get even close to empty! (The engine oil was rather low, too, but that was a little less traumatic, as I was aware of the probability of this).

As my friend continued to look at my car and talk to me about it, I added some anti-freeze. He graciously did not harass my incompetence (although he did encourage me to keep the fluids a bit higher.) He even complimented me on the great organizational state of my trunk, which I had to acknowledge was my father’s doing [my father had seen it at Christmas and freaked at the disaster zone it had become: several bottles of fluids strewn in different places in the trunk, the carpet up (I had spilled windshield washer fluid on the carpet and it needed to dry and had never been fixed up), a speaker fallen down, and bags strewn all over the place. So my father cleaned it out for me, and with the aforementioned key problem, I’d only opened it about three times since he’d cleaned it]. And all this male interest in my trunk makes me realize that i really do not understand the male mind.

The puddle was a bit large to be just power steering fluid but it seemed clear enough so it was possible (although it was hard to tell for sure since the major fluids were all low). The best bet was to fill up the fluids (another gracious reminder from my friend) and see what got low.

A few days later, the car had a green puddle under it. With a bit of diagnosis (getting my roommate’s fiancé to help me and checking autozone.com), we figured out it was the water pump. Which makes the low state of antifreeze slightly more explainable though hardly excusing my incompetence here.

Somehow, though, I don’t entirely think this is what my mentor had in mind when he talked about incompetence.

Thankfully all is now well with my car. [Except it needs an oil change and a windshield wiper definitely needs replacing and I need to figure out what‘s happening with my brakes to make my car shudder slightly when I use them (hopefully it just needs a new brake pad or two)]. And as much as I look forward to not having to own a car next year, hopefully this experience will teach me to look after my car a bit better – it is, after all, one of the possessions that I’m supposed to be honouring God with.