H.E.P.A.

I took my car into The Dealer to have the oil changed the other day.  As a general rule I don't trust people who work on my car because I don't know anything about cars.  I believe I could find the area of the car where the engine thing is located but that's about it.  So the car guys can say whatever they want: "Mr. Seaweed, your Johnson Rod is in terrible shape."  

What am I going to say: "I don't think so - I inspected all four of the Johnson Rods just last week and they were in fine working mettle."

I tend to do what car people say should be done because the car is a pretty expensive item.  As a general rule I don't trust people who work on my body, either, because they can scare the shit out of me and I don't know enough about the body to mount a rigorous defense.  So what am I going to say when the medical guy who makes a lot of money and has gone to school forever says: "Mr. Seaweed, your Johnson Valve - it connects the stomach to the duodenum - is falling apart and we need to operate."

Generally, I take a walk when the car people are in action.  I don't even want to be in the same building when those people start poking around the car's moving parts.  I got a phone call during my walk telling me that the engine filter and the cabin filter were very, very dirty.  I did not return this call, preferring the "if I don't answer the phone I can't get any bad news" defense.  I decided, in my mind, to pass on replacing these filters.  Unfortunately, when I got back to The Dealer they had already replaced them at the cost of $130.  These must have been some pretty important filters.  I told them to take them right on back off.  I noticed up on the Pricing Board that one of the filters was called a Hepa Cabin Filter and it cost $80.  I didn't research the engine filter - I'm pretty good at math and could come up with a ballpark figure on that dude.

I asked my service gal, Bell, what she thought I was doing in the cabin itself?  Running a Class IV Clean Room so that I could polish semiconductor wafers?  Conducting emergency surgery on some poor sot's Johnson Valve?  HEPA, in case you're wondering, stands for High Efficiency Particulate Air.  I asked Bell if maybe they had a more moderately priced filter, perhaps a JAEPA - a Just Average Efficiency Particulate Air.  She said they did not.

There was another woman in the waiting room who needed a HEPA filter, too, AND some new windshield wipers.

"The car is only a year old," she said.  "And it hasn't rained since I bought it."  It's the desert here, basically - it doesn't rain too often.  The woman wondered why these wipers wore out.  She wasn't too happy with old Bell.

Do you think either of us will go back to that dealer?