Sooo helpless... and that's not annoying at all

Right from the top I'll say excuse me if this gets snitty quickly. I had a bit of a gwk (that'd be Gimpy the Wonder Klutz, for those new to the program) moment this morning (and personally I'm blaming the Toronto office for bringing up the whole gwk thing last night. I'd been doing fairly well in the clumsiness department until she reminded me of my old internet moniker. It's all her fault, then, and I'm going to keep saying that until she actually responds in some way. My counter tells me she hasn't been stopping by the blog too much lately, so this blame game may go on for a while...) and right now my throbbing ankle's telling me that I probably should have put a brace on before I came to work.

Oops.

Ah well. I'll just try to walk carefully, that's all. Not that it worked out so well this morning, but whatever.





Um, anyway.

I don't have much on the brain at the moment, but I did want to address something I saw while waiting at the garage (for two effing hours, did I mention?) earlier in the week. Now, to set the scene a bit, this garage is a fairly busy place. It also has a little drive-through thing where you drop off your car for servicing, and the drive-through is visible from the waiting area. Those of us with short attention spans (i.e. me) spent a fair amount of the two hours we were there watching people drop off their cars.

At one point a woman pulled in, obviously without an appointment, and wanted something looked at right away. Something to do with the back end of the car. I was intrigued.

Ok, honestly? I was just really bored. I watched because it was about the only thing to watch.

The next thing I knew, the guy at the service desk headed out there with a screwdriver and started to take the thing apart right in the drive-through. That's when it dawned on me. This woman had come all the way to a busy dealership garage to have someone replace a burned-out tail light.

Seriously.

And then she had the nerve to ask (or more like threaten) whether they were going to tack on a labour charge on top of the cost of the bulb.

Geeeeez.

They didn't, for some reason. I would have.

You see, the thing is that changing a tail light isn't hard. You generally need a screwdriver and a bulb. Sometimes the hardest part is just finding the right screwdriver (I need a torx head for mine, and that can admittedly be a bit of a pain in the arse in a pinch). And if you don't know how to take apart the mount to get to the burned-out bulb? Well... hey girls, that's what owner's manuals are for. Most cars have them in the glove compartment, you know. Just turn to the part that says tail lights.

It's just that simple.

Now, I know that it sounds like I'm making a big deal out of nothing and that the folks at the garage see that kind of thing all the time, but that's sort of my point. They see that kind of thing all the time, and there's no reason for it. I just don't get the whole helpless femme act that seems to be the regular m.o. for a large part of the female population. I'm a girl. I couldn't possibly fix a minor problem with my car (house, lawnmower, insert other objects ad nauseum) all by myself.

Gah.

Hey, I'm a girl too. I'm not terribly mechanical. I know enough about how to read instructions, though, to at least ATTEMPT to figure minor things out. I know when I'm out of my depth, but I'm willing to give something a try before deciding that it's beyond me.

All right. In the interest of full disclosure I will admit that ages ago when I had to take some aptitude tests as part of a career workshop -- back in the days when I thought that I might like to have a career someday -- I scored much higher on the mechanical aptitude test than I would have expected. That's just aptitude, though. It doesn't mean that I actually know how to do anything mechanically-related.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that most of us are only as helpless as we want to make ourselves. And when you want to make yourself helpless for no good reason, that's juuust a little bit annoying. Both to the people who get stuck helping you and to the people who are rolling their eyes after discovering yet another useless twit in the world.

The world has enough useless twits already.

If you choose to be one of them, then I get to choose to roll my eyes.




Sounds like a fair deal to me.