I’ve Been Stuck in a Car Wash

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Not sure if this has ever happened to anyone else, but I was stuck in a car wash the other night.  It happened at the Petro-Canada on the corner of Victoria and Fleet Street in Regina.

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Pretty snappy picture eh? Thanks Google.

Back to my story, I was driving my company truck at the time. It’s a reasonably large 2008 Chevy Silverado. I’d taken it through this same car wash before, usually once a week, so I wasn’t worried about it not fitting.

After plugging in my payment card, the equipment fires up and away I go, everything seems normal. I go past the high pressure spray nozzles, and through the multi-colour foam machine. Everything is fine. Next come the spinning scrubbing cylinders on either side, and the overhead strips of cloth that drape over my windshield blinding me from the mechanical scrubbing frenzy taking place outside.

Just then, while I’m blind to everything around me, the steering wheel jerks hard to the right, the truck bounces a bit, stops moving, starts moving, bounces again, then stops moving for good. I would like to point out and emphasize at this point that I neither turned the steering wheel nor touched the breaks at any point.

Eventually the equipment stops spinning, the water stops spraying, and the whole machine grinds to a halt. I get out of the truck to examine the situation while I’m waiting for the attendant to come out. What I find is that some of the same cloth that was covering my windshield had been caught between the front driver side tire, and the metal rail that keeps your vehicle pointed in the correct direction. Seems to me that this was enough to cause the side wall of the tire to bind to the rail and cause the tires to turn and jam.

The attendant comes out, and quickly breaks into a lecture on how I should not have stepped on the break or turned the wheel while I was in the car wash. I explain that I didn’t, and point out the cloth wedged between the tire and the rail.

“Oh,” she says, “that’s not the problem, your truck must be too big.”

Of course I’m skeptical, given the regular frequency in which I take this same vehicle through this same car wash, but I didn’t really feel like arguing.

“I don’t know what to do, I’ll need to get the manager” With that she leaves, and I’m back to waiting. After a few minuets, I’m greeted by the manager and another lecture on not using the breaks or turning the steering wheel. Again I explain that I did neither, though I’m certain he did not believe me.

The manager says, “You’ll have to start your truck and drive out once I open the door. Then come through again and remember not to touch your breaks or steering wheel.” Yeah, a double dose of lecture. Oh well, I just want to get on the road again, so I don’t bother arguing with him.

I hop into the truck, put in the key, turn it, and nothing. That’s right, nothing. Somehow during the brief time I spent in the car wash the battery had died. I always turn the truck off when going through the car wash to save gas, this time it didn’t pan out. The in-dash meter was reading just over 9 volts, enough to make a clicking sound and run the radio, but not much else.

This is where things got fun. I, along with the manager and his attendant, had to push the truck out of the car wash. I had to turn the wheel and clear the fabric before it would move, but that did little to dissuade either of them to thinking that I had not deliberately caused my truck to stop in the car wash, and was now faking a battery problem.

We all got wet and waxy pushing that truck through all the fabric scrubbers, my jacket was soaked, my gloves were soaked, my pants were soaked, and I was none to happy. Once outside I quickly managed to find someone at the pumps in a Kramer company vehicle to give me a boost. The truck started right away, and thus ended my car was adventure for the evening.

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2009 Grey Cup Video

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

I just had to pass this on when I saw it. I didn’t make it, just found it on Youtube. If you’re Canadian and you watched the CFL Grey Cup Game in 2009, you’ll get it.

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