Oil Can What?

Great game, Volvo. My car, who I haven’t named yet. My last car was called Andy because its Connecticut license plate was ND252. Get it? ND? Andy? Never mind. Maybe I’ll call her Sweedie. Since she comes from Sweden, you know. Plus I can order her around, make her take me places of questionable, if not quite ill, repute, and wait outside.

“Hey, Sweedie! Take me to the whore shack (like I said, not quite ill repute) and then the beer room (ditto.)”

 It annoys my feminist friends, those I still have.

Anyway, cars used to have oil pressure lights on the dashboard. If the light comes on, it means that you are down a quart. And that it is too late. Now I get a ‘message’ on the dashboard like, ‘Oil low,’ or ‘You’re drunk again.’

“Why didn’t you take a look at my dipstick once in a while, you dipstick, instead of always playing with yours?”

“What? You can talk now?”

“Of course, I can talk. Do you think it’s just that skank, Alexa?”

Volvos don’t have dipsticks. People never look at them, anyway. They don’t have primitive oil pressure lights, either. Instead, they have computer controls, which you can use to monitor all of the vital signs of the car without getting your hands dirty or wiping off an erect strip of greasy metal with a McDonald’s napkin by the side of the road because the light came on. You just put the car in accessory mode, so it isn’t running, press the Info button, and scroll through a child’s garden of wonderful options in icon mode, one of which is a little oil can. It then tells you how much oil is in your car. Except it doesn’t.

What it does is show you a virtual gage which is highlighted to indicate what a dipstick would look like in a real, gets your hands dirty, circumstance. Except it doesn’t. It has only two modes: ‘Full’ and ‘Down a Quart.’ In other words, it is an oil pressure light pretending to be a dipstick; ‘Look, I’m full!’ ‘Look, I’m full!’ ‘Look, I’m full!’ ‘Oh, by Oden! Now it’s too late!’

And to make sure you believe its fake news, they have removed the real dipstick so you can’t do an oil check the old fashioned, i.e., reliable, way. I’m sure there is a metaphor in there somewhere. I could go on about the polarization of political views, Zero sum Games, Zeno’s paradox, and not being allowed to look up the facts for yourself and derive your own damned conclusions. I suppose. Later.

And to make matters worse, recently, while moving to Florida, I was driving my car and my brother around the Tampa region doing various errands, waiting for my stuff from Godot’s Highly Prompt Moving Company, and feeling really cool that I actually made it to Florida (take that Ritzo Ratzo!) when suddenly, an informational message (formally a light) blazed from the dash board.

“Oil Pressure at zero! Pull over and turn off engine now. I said Now. NOW! I canno’ change the laws of physics, Laddy! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!”

Sorry, I had it in Annoying Scotty mode.

It was about a hundred degrees outside (late winter in Florida) and we had been doing short jumps running errands; lunch, decoding Florida traffic etiquette, buying replacement stuff for dumpster offerings left to the Connecticut bulky wasteland, and generally bee-bopping around; when the evil message shouted at me, accusingly.

I had seen a low oil message before. Last year I got one about five thousand miles past my last oil change. They are supposed to last for ten thousand. It just said, ‘Oil Pressure Warning’ with a little icon of an empty oil can shrugging and no panic. I got a quart of Mrs. Edith Leakall's Premium Reserve Sausage Oil and poured it into some opening in the engine, the air intake, perhaps. And that was that. Offler was appeased.

With this new, apocalyptic message (who programmed that one in, anyway?) I, of course, panicked. We pulled into another parking space in the Publix grocery store and shut off the engine, now probably bursting into flames and grinning,

“See? I told you not to go to that whore shack and leave me to the highwaymen in the dark alley they call a parking lot! And now, look at me? It’s getting dark. And so cold in here. Is that the Sun or Satan’s dark visage I see? Or a knife? Ya, maybe a knife. Parting is such sweet sorrow. I can’t feel my tires anymore… Veni, vidi…, mori… And now, I go... Adieu… Adieu… Adieu…”

God, no. Not Shakespeare mode.

We got out of the car. There were none of the telltale signs that a mechanical organism was going through its last throws, dramatically: Heat billowing from the engine, that tick-tick-tick sound it makes when it is in a thermal state they never talk about an engine school, the overall, ‘I’m gonna die!’ aura all creatures make at their last breath. It just looked like a car that had just pulled into a parking spot and was content to wait for us wherever we were going (she learned to stop asking.)

We looked under the car. No oil was dripping from deeply gouged pans. No knife in her bowels. No existential dichotomy of Being vs. Not Being. Either the engine was empty and about to explode or happily full and wondering why we were looking under her skirts.

“The whores weren’t enough for you?”

“Shut up, Sweedie!”

“I heard that.”

“What, do you have a microphone up your tailpipe or something?”

“And a camera.”

“Now that’s creepy.”

Ahem. We went back to the first space we were in to see if there was a pool of synthetic sausage oil giddily soaking into the asphalt. I saw liquid. I was sure it contained sausages and the ground up remains of engine internals.

It was greasy, but not very. It was mostly water. I smeared it between my fingers, smelled and tasted it. Not much oil. No antifreeze. Mostly water. Distilled water. This was just the air conditioner runoff you see on every parking spot in Florida at any time of the year. No unintentioned leaking, in other words.

Let me back up. I should tell you something that might further explain my panic. Before we went to the grocery store, we were in another mall buying other things in other Floridian shops. I was just getting used to those things they colloquially call parking lots and entrance/exit lanes, etc., in the Floridaverse, I was becoming a Floridiot. And learning a valuable lesson: When driving down a lane at the edge of a parking lot toward an exit to a road that leads to the road going back to the main, multi-laned road which form the main arteries of every Florida town, village, and hamlet, look carefully. There might be a clearly marked indicator of where they want you to turn. This indicator might, frequently, be in the form of a raised curb shaped like a rounded triangle marking off two ‘lanes,’ one coming into the parking lot from the left and one going out of said parking lot to the right, with a very nasty bit in the middle to discourage those wishing to go out or in the wrong way. They do this so you can see that they only want you to make a right turn whether you want to or not.

OK. Traffic control is nothing if not futile in Florida, but did I say clearly marked? I meant cleverly camouflaged. This demonic aid to navigation was all road colored, eight inches tall, and serrated on top, just the ticket to act as potato peeler to anyone who, say, exits the parking lot at a not too unreasonable ten or fifteen miles an hour and hits it off center while committing the sin of Trying-To-Turn-Left. It didn’t even have some plants or a dead oak growing from it. An orange tree or avocado would have been visible, at least. A statue! Pink flamingos standing in rows. These are a few of my... Even some red radium paint sprayed on the edges or a Jersey barrier around it. Something to scream, Watch out!

Now let me back forward, to the parking lot of Publix and the exploding engine.

Oops. I had visions of finding the undercarriage of my car mutilated beyond human or car recognition. Then one of us noticed. There was a panel missing along the right side of the car below the doors. Then one of us remembered, possibly the same one, that homicidal homage to car mechanics and body shops in the last parking lot! We must have impaled Sweedie on it!

Now I really was in a snit. Here was a readymade explanation. I had run over a raised razer blade washboard with two wheels, giving maximum penetration to the exact vulnerable underbelly of my car’s unmentionable parts. Now I was siting in another, suddenly menacing, parking lot puzzled that my car doesn’t look in worse shape than it does, the only emission being normal AC droppings. No oil. No smoke from burning oil still clinging to the now overheated engine. No unfamiliar and terrifying sounds from an engine in pain and peril. No temperature needle redlining. (Now why can’t the oil gage actually show a graduation from Full to Add-a-Quart?) Just a car sitting contentedly in a parking spot chewing its cud, or whatever cars do when waiting for us to finish whatever we do.

Other than some minor yet glaring body damage, it was fine.

My first impression, which was to stop the car in its throws of death and call my Volvo roadside service provider for last rights or something, gave way to a cautious reconsideration. After debate, checking the oil (what? There isn’t an actual dipstick under the hood? What the f-)eeling around for any actual breaches in the expensive parts under the car, we cautiously decided that what we were experiencing was a cruel coincidence, engineered by an impersonal, yet oddly creatively vindictive, universe.

Coincidental event A: The oil sensor went into panic mode for no good reason. Coincidental event B, I ran over an urban IED and scraped off some of the fiberglass body parts of my car, expensive but not life threatening. Or car threatening. Apart, they were just that. Two unrelated events. Together, they appeared as cause and effect when actually they were unrelated happenstances, but more than willing to let me draw as many, costly, conclusions as I liked. There’s a Greek play in there somewhere. Iphigenia in Tampa? Oedipus at Florida? I never had any of those thoughts toward either of my parents.

So we decided that the car, though maimed, had only received a fiberglass wound and could function quite well. Out of curiosity, we went back to the killing fields of the drug store and found the amputated body panel and a surprise. There was also a wheel well lining, from the passenger back wheel well. Well, what do you know? Wheel of Fortune or what?

Sorry. Here it is, isn’t it? All of the damage appeared to occur to the back half of the car and on the right side, nowhere near the engine, with no damage to the drive train, only the soul train. Get it? The parts of the car that look pretty, not the grimy bits within that do all the work?

OK. I’ll stop.

We continued with whatever it was that we were doing. The car stopped its dissociation that had occurred with relating body damage to a heart attack. Although not quite. Like I said, the temperature was around a hundred or so, whose counting? And I did notice a possible pattern. Or another coincidence. After driving around in the hot Florida humidity saturated air, with the air conditioner blasting, and the temperature gage registering a tolerable just above 50% (if we can believe it) and then stopping at a red light or something, sometimes the Chicken Little warning and impending oil destruction of my engine would come up again. When I drove on, it stopped. Of course, I was inclined to take that with a grain of hydrocarbon, but I also remembered the moral of the Little Chicken: One day there really is a wolf.

So, first chance I could, I made an appointment with Volvo of Tampa to have the old girl looked over by a credible oracle. And mechanic. I dropped her off in the morning and walked a mile or so to a restaurant called Mom’s Place. It was right next to Pop ‘n Sons Diner, either a family business or rivalry. I peaked through the windows of both and decided that Mom’s Place looked more nostalgic. I had the steak and eggs with grits and a biscuit, along with a waitress who called my Hon and kept refilling my coffee. Nice and southern. Though I didn’t get to keep the waitress.

I heard from the service office at Volvo. The oil light was sincere, but only in a manner of speaking. When was my last oil change? At my last service, 50,000 miles in December. Well, the oil is down, he didn’t say by how much. It had something to do with the PCV valve having a pinhole in its diaphragm membrane. That can hurt. Or cause pregnancy. And something about the rings. After sex women always start talking about rings.

They want to change the oil, replace the PCV valve, add some oil gunk to clean the rings, do some other super duper car spa, deep tissue massage or something, and have me bring it back in after a thousand miles to see how the old girl is doing. OK.

“Oh, and your tires are bupkis.”

I knew they were bad, but bupkis? They’re Pirellis! Though a recent four thousand miles back and forth from Connecticut didn’t help.

“Sure, add those as well.”

“And your old tires are unevenly worn. You need an alignment, too.”

Why not? And the hot wax and polish, while you’re at it.

“OK.”

On my way back to the dealership, I got a call from my insurance agent. Time for more back story. I had received a letter the other day saying that my insurance policy for the house in Wesley Chapel was being cancelled because the coverage requested was greater than the replacement value of the property and they can’t have that, now. Can they? I might nuke the house for the extra hundred bucks worth of insurance claim. I had the letter with me and was planning to call today. More serendipity.

It’s a good thing I was having my car fixed. I might end up living in it.

The nice, kindly insurance clerk/agent/human groaned apologetically and played good agent.

“We wouldn’t do that, we’re the good guys, yada, yada, and have you seen the email with an amended contract lowering the amount insured and asking you to E-sign it?”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to smoke those things.”

“What?”

“I haven’t seen any emails.”

“I’ll be sure to have the agent (bad agent?) resend it to you.”

“That would be accommodating.”

I found my way back to the dealership, full of grits, biscuits, and insurance uncertainty. There, another agent, of sorts, merrily tallied up the billing.

“Tires, Pirellis, eight hundred dollars.”

“They were a thousand the last time I bought them.”

“Diagnostic, I’ll give you that for free.”

“Thanks. It pays for itself.”

“PCV Valve, four hundred and fifty.”

What? The thing was a little metal hash pipe on the side of the tappets’ cover when I-. Never mind. That was in the irrelevant past. “OK.”

“The oil change is normally one hundred, but it’s covered on your plan.”

“Oh, good.” I knew that for once, it might prove useful to buy one of those maintenance plan thingies when I bought Sweedie. She’s a Volvo, after all. That means expensive in Swedish. Plus, I paid for it back when I had money.

“Ninety dollars for an oil treatment they want to add to clean the rings.”

“We used call that STP.”

“And bring it back in a thousand miles so they can monitor it again.”

“On my honor.”

And they would keep it for a day. They didn’t have any loaner cars, but they sent me to Mr. Enterprise-Rental to get one I could use. They have an arrangement, you see. Actually, it was quite good. I paid thirty bucks a day for two days’ worth of insurance and I got a car. Whatever car happened to be available. Mr. Enterprise-Rental was on site. They do that much business. He phoned up a car for me.

“Oh, you got a good one. It’s a Land Rover.”

“A land what? Is that good?”

“Sure, it’s an SUV.”

I’m not fine on big cars. Or big on fine cars. Beyond station wagons. Or ‘Sports Wagons’ as Volvo likes to call the likes of Sweedie. That, and twenty-six foot Budget rental trucks (called ‘Bud’) are about my boundaries. Though I drove a fork lift in a factory for a summer job I had in high school once. But, whatever. The last time I rented a vehicle I knocked down a light post. What worse can happen?

The SUV they gave me was a Disc Ovary. What? My eyes are not really functional these days. Let me squint. A Disco Very. Very Disco? It doesn’t look very seventies. Oh, it’s a Discovery! A Land Crusher Discovery! Why didn’t you say so?

The deal was, just take it today and bring it back tomorrow and we’ll charge you for the gas and nobody gets hurt. Mr. E-R put down three eights of a tank for me. It was closer to half. I brought it back just under a quarter, making me one eighth ahead of the deal. Or behind. That and ten bucks will get you a Starbucks Mega-Supreme-Dispensary-Vape. But only in states where it is legal.

I tried to divine the driving console. Won’t be driving at night so I don’t need to know how to turn on the lights. Sweedie does it for me, anyway, so I don’t know how to turn lights on in cars anymore. And I don’t know how many of me it would take to change a lightbulb. Far more than anyone would care to consider.

I surmounted the driver’s door and climbed into the seat. The view was quite good and I only had to equalize my ears twice. It’s always good to be the one looking down on people, for a change. I got on 275 going some direction I wanted to go. North? Sure. Cruise control would be nice. Without it I end up going about ninety-five miles an hour on a straight, flat road. It’s a kind of reverse entropy. Instead of my universe slowing down, it always wants to speed up.

I started playing with some controls that had no business not being cruise control. It had a ‘Set’ function. A ‘Resume’ function. Up and down arrows which can only refer to desired speed. What else could it mean? I started pushing them, unwisely. What by all rights should have been cruise control was the setting for maximum speed, a very useful feature for me, I grant. Only I couldn’t quite figure out how it worked, but I quickly learned that a maximum of fifteen miles an hour on I-275 out of Tampa was the wrong choice.

Butter futz with the radio. No better luck there. But at least trying to switch channels and only switching between AM and FM wouldn’t cause a blistering block up on the I-275. Do they call Interstates the I-Something in Florida?

Having reached home using my own navigational device, I dared not try to figure out Ovary Disc’s map demon, I stopped the car, dialed the transmission to “P” (Yes, the shift is a dial. Why not? Some cars used to have pushbuttons to shift gears. To each his own,) pushed the Start/stop button, and got out. I fumbled with the lock button. That’s how cars are driven now. Brother Button and Sister voice activation system.

The side mirrors tucked in when the doors locked. How peculiar. It was like the car was tucking itself in, husbanding its strength, and waiting and watching. I couldn’t help but to keep looking over my shoulders as I tried not to run to my door.

Next morning and I still hadn’t received any emails from Bad Insurance Agent Smith. I called Good Insurance Agent Smith.

“Oh, I was wrong about the email. You won’t receive an email from her until we had a chance to speak to you.”

“Oh, hah, hah. Obviously. Snail mail threats are exempt, I suppose? So what can I expect next?”

“You’ll get an email with a link to an amended policy. You can open it and E-sign it.”

“I thought you said-OK. Fine. Just don’t turn me out of my home.” Bother.

And I brought Sister Disco Ovary back to Mr. E-R at the place where Sweedie was enjoying a spa promptly the next day, before my car was even ready. Silly me. They told me that a few other things were done for my car; new spark plugs, cabin filter, maybe more. But it was all included in my contract. The bill was a few Franklin’s less that originally quoted.

Lovely.

Still. I made sure to eat all of their more expensive snacks in the waiting area.