It’s been raining hard all night. Relentlessly. It has been for days, on and off. It had been a wet winter. Now it was a wet spring.
The rain stopped half an hour ago and Mrs. Jones, who works as a book keeper at a small manufacturing company four miles away down the road, opens her kitchen door and looks at the late spring morning. It’s six thirty and the thick fog accompanying the slight rise in temperature obscures her view of the end of her garden.
She thinks about the day ahead amid all the kitchen type noises and the smell of nearly burning toast and the irresistible aroma of bacon sizzling in the background.
Her aged Ford waits patiently in the street a few houses away over a large puddle which formed during the night. A faithful old retainer, stubbornly refusing to bend to the inevitable that it’s rusty appearance suggests that it should. The mechanic keeps issuing MOT certificates every year as he observes the deterioration moving relentlessly nearer and nearer to the critical points which will stop both him and the car in their combined tracks. Not this year though.
Every machine eventually wears out or fails in some other way, it’s just a matter of when this will happen. There’s no getting away from it, unless a satellite unexpectedly falls on it from outer space or it suddenly ceases to exist due to spontaneous combustion. Anyway, the end result’s the same. It stops doing what you want it to.
But this ceasing to function doesn’t have to be because it failed an MOT. The car may look perfectly fine and dandy, but hidden underneath its relatively unchanging exterior, other changes are happening, unseen and sinister.
It only needs a very small thing to stop a car from running. It could be a big thing, but it doesn’t need to be. There are countless moving and non-moving parts which all need to work at the same time. All of them. No shift work here or days off for good behaviour. And the environment within which they all live does everything it possibly can to stop them working. And ‘it’ takes no time off either. Heat, cold, moisture, dust, muck, owners (the average type), aliens and no doubt other stuff we are yet to discover, but as ‘eggs is eggs’ deterioration happens. When was the last time you looked inside your starter motor and compared it to the inside of a new one? When was the last time you took off the connectors and saw the corrosion that ‘today’ did ‘not’ stop your starter motor from working? It wasn’t there on day one. And it’s relentlessly creeping nearer and nearer every day to the point when it will stick two fingers up at you. It will. Really, it will. Unless you change the car or a satellite falls on it … or you fix it … ooops sorry, forgot that one.
But all this is pretty obvious. Here’s the amazing thing though. And you see this everywhere. People getting annoyed. But it’s not just annoyed. They get vindictively angry. They actually blame the car. They do. They call it all sorts, when it stops them from getting to work or to aunty Mable’s coffee morning. They get into the car and expect it to do just what it did yesterday. And they expect this every day. They expect it. “Well, it was okay yesterday,” they announce in utter amazement to anyone who will listen, when today it does what was actually entirely predictable.
So when Mrs. Jones gets into the familiar surroundings of her faithful old Ford, replete with bacon and eggs, turns the key and the engine bursts into life, she isn’t at all surprised. However, every time I get into my old Rover and turn the key, and she starts, I am always most grateful that it wasn’t today.
The question is … “why aren’t you surprised?”