No matter how long I’ve been doing this…surprise

I’ve been driving for a lot of years. More than I care to admit to most of the time.

I can’t say for sure how many miles I’ve logged on my backside, but I can safely say it’s well above average for a non-commercial driver, and probably just under normal for a commercial driver.

I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff across those miles. And I’ve been involved in a lot of strange situations.

I’ve been called out in the middle of the night to pull a law enforcement vehicle out of the sand on a beach with my Jeep because the officer was too embarrassed to call a tow truck. I’ve had trailer axles break and the tires race me down the highway.

I’ve had garages not tighten my lug nuts enough and have the rim fly off the car on the highway. I’ve had water hoses break, fuel pumps quit, tires go flat, points burn through, spark plugs break and all manner of other internal combustion engine chicanery.

But I’ve never seen before what I saw Tuesday night.

I had to stay at work all day Tuesday when I usually spend a lot of time running around calling on clients and friends because Holly was on a delivery mission to the Upper Keys. She took my Jeep.

The reason she took my Jeep was because the power-window motor in her Camaro quit working—in the down position—hours before the heaviest rain we’ve had in months.

The rain came overnight, with no warning. The car got wet inside.

We can add to that her back window falling out of the convertible top a few weeks back, forcing us to back the car under the house every night to prevent puddles from an unexpected rain.

But we didn’t put it far enough under the house to cover the window. My mistake. One of my more blond moments, and I’m not blond.

Anyway, she had the Jeep.

She calls me from somewhere northbound.

When she asked me if this qualified for the third I knew immediately that something was wrong.

It is our firm belief that Murphy is triplets. If things are going to go wrong, they’re going to go wrong in threes.

So she proceeds to tell me that the air conditioning in the Jeep has just broken.

“Broken?”

“Yeah, like in making weird noises and smelling funny.”

Bearings, thinks I immediately.

Then I remembered the time I took the Jeep to my brother the mechanic to look at a noise and smell issue in the air conditioner and it turned out to be plastic delivery bags that had been sucked up into the unit.

I was assured by my ever-vigilant wife that this wasn’t a case of loose plastic bags being sucked into the blower.

“It’s a cool day, I’ll use the windows,” she says.

Later in the afternoon she returns. I have to run to Cudjoe Key to call on a client. I take the Jeep.

A few minutes south of the office, I decided to try the air conditioning unit, not because I didn’t believe her, but to see what the funny sound and smell was like.

I turned on the unit.

It’s very difficult to explain what the unit sounded like. First, there was a distinct thumping noise, but muffled, not sharp like metal would have been.

Second, there was the sound of a blender, only more quiet.

Then was the tell-tale sound of fan blades slapping against plastic. We all know that sound. It’s never good.

What made me wonder enough to try the unit a second time, however, was that I heard the spinning sound (blender) but I felt no air moving through the vents.

As I listened to the thump-whir-rattle a couple more times (I figured I couldn’t tear it up any worse than it was already torn up) I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye.

There, bouncing on the floorboard on the passenger side of the vehicle was the blower motor for the air conditioning.

The motor had somehow escaped its moorings up under the dashboard and fallen into the floor.

The thumping noise was the fan blades bouncing off the carpet. The whirring noise was the squirrel-cage spinning like it was supposed to. The rattle was the entire assembly bouncing into the plastic door frame and the squirrel-cage fan rotating against the plastic several times before it bounced on the floor board again.

I was astonished. I had never seen that happen in more than 36 years of driving.

I can remember trying to get blower motors out from under dashboards. I would come out of the engagement with cut fingers and forearms, twisted into a pretzel position from wriggling that part over and around every obstruction some deviant designer could place in the way.

And there, with no fanfare, with no bruising of either flesh or ego, with no vocabulary enhancement of the four-letter variety, laid my blower motor, spinning and bouncing like the drunkest girl at the bar.

I felt cheated. I felt more cheated when my brother put the dang thing back in with a twist of his wrist and a screw to replace the broken lock tab that caused the problem in the first place.

No blood. No profanity. No pain.

No wonder I gave up working on cars.

No Comments »