Like studying my royalty statements, visiting mechanics gives me the unsettling feeling that I’m somehow getting screwed and that I’m too dumb to ever understand how exactly.

I bought two tires at Sam’s Wholesale not long ago, because they were the cheapest.  But they don’t do alignment, so I went down the street for that, to another place that only does tire stuff.

Then, just a few days later, I noticed my car was tugging hard to the right.  So I took it back to the second place this morning and asked them to check my alignment again.  They took a quick look and said it didn’t need to be re-aligned.  They’d done their job right the first time, they said.  I have a “radial pull,” they said.

This is not helpful.  One, because no one but a tire guy knows what a “radial pull” is and two, because a “radial pull” isn’t place number two’s problem, they say.  It’s a problem for Sam’s. It’s a tire problem.

So, I trek over to Sam’s and tell them what the tire guy at place number two said.  Sam’s says it’s probably place number two’s problem, that place number two is lying to me, but they’ll check it out because I kindly tell them I won’t leave until they do and then I sit down in the waiting area with a magazine and a chicken biscuit and wait. 

They call me into the garage an hour later and tell me my tires aren’t balanced.  I pull out my receipt from Sam’s showing that they, Sam’s, supposedly balanced them only a month ago.  I was charged for that, I remind them.  Suddenly, the tug to the right I’m getting isn’t a balance problem but a bent wheel problem.  Alrighty, I say.  Can you guys fix that?  No, they say.  Thats not something they do.

How convenient.  For them.

I ask how they know it’s not a “radial pull,” pretending of course to know what that is.  They say you can’t see a “radial pull” unless it’s a “big one.”

Apparently a “radial pull” is the mechanic’s equivalent of the theologian’s Holy Spirit or the physicist’s worm hole.  We’re certain they exist but they can’t exactly be observed, exactly.  We can, however, observe their effects on a charismatic tent meeting, the passage of light through space, or, say, my ability to drive in a straight line.

Monday morning I head into Nashville to have my wheels unbent and get yet another opinion on why my car changes lanes to the right if I stop pulling to the left.

I think I’ll wear a camouflaged hat and a shirt with some football team or monster truck on the front to this time.  I suspect that breasts and/or a creative looking haircut on a customer alerts the mechanic species to the probable lack of car knowledge contained in said customer’s brain and automatically flips the “screw you” switch in the mechanics own brain.  Made up words and half truths spew uncontrollably from his face after that and he suddenly lacks the ability to admit culpability and say things like “I’m sorry” and “no charge.”

Without mechanics how much easier would it be to embrace non-violence as the way of Jesus?

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