Vehicular Rejection

What if your vehicle doesn't like you? Or maybe it just doesn't like your outfit? How would a car tell you this?

One possibility is what happened to my dear little cousin Jenna last week. Aside from the lack of a side mirror and the tendency to forget to wash the car, she and her 1995 Toyota Tercel had always seen eye to eye.

Until that day.

My punky and pierced protege hopped into her car for work at a Calgarian call centre dressed in an Emily Strange hoodie and some very "well loved" jeans. These jeans were in fact so well loved that, due to a lack of proper alterations, the heel of her left shoe had worn a large hole just above the hem creating a loop similar to that of the “stirrup pants” of the mid 80's.

Despite her punky-posh persona, Jenna had secretly been starring in her own car concert featuring selections from Swedish pop sensation "ABBA" during this particular drive. As she pulled into a parking stall she sang farewell to Fernando before she put her car in park and looked up at her window covered office building, wondering if the 100 or so coworkers that had desks near the windows were looking at her car at that moment.

Slinging her purse, her lunch bag and her work bag over both shoulders, Jenna had an load of baggage strewn over her comparable to what some people might take on an 8 month hiking excursion through an Arctic Tundra. Realizing that the sheer girth of her luggage was not going to make it out the car door by way of a conventional exit strategy, Jenna decided she could still manoeuvre out with a little creativity.

Jenna opened the door wide into the empty stall next to her. She swung her right leg over her left, planted her right foot on the ground and used it as a push off point to launch herself forward like a bullet in the direction of the back end of the car.

Logistically speaking, this move may have worked and kept all of her bags in tact… but let's not forget the loop at the hem of her jeans...

That's right.

Somehow, during her drive to work the loop at the bottom of her jeans had become wrapped around both the trunk release and the gas cap lever located on the floor next to the driver's door. Now imagine this combined with the momentum she used to launch herself out the door in a twisted forward motion.

Splat.

There was poor Jenna flat on the pavement in front of the building with 100 other call centre employees pressing their faces against the glass. And as if her landing on the pavement in her parking stall with 3 bags in tow wasn't enough of an attention getter...

The gas cap and trunk popped open.

Oh yes. You read that right. It was as though her car spat her out like some bad-tasting tater tots and then shouted to the world "Ha! Take that!"

The extreme denim distress her jeans endured as they were being both held inside the car by the loose hem, and propelled out of the car by Jenna's exit momentum, caused her waist button to angrily pop off as if to protest the abuse.

But perhaps the worst injury was to dear little Jenna’s self-esteem.

When asked what she learned from this experience the answer was concise: Treat your car right. You never know what it’s been plotting.

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Thanks for enjoying these deep thoughts with Meghan.