I was a patient kid.
I know that may come as a shock to many of you, and it’s a startling admission I’d normally only make if the magazines paid the right price.
I remember being really good at waiting.
Waiting in the doctor’s office.
Waiting for certain shows to come on.
Waiting my turn.
Somewhere along the way I lost that ability and now I may well be the Most Impatient Person on Earth.
Like, I’m at New Yorker levels of “get it done”.
There’s ways I’ve found it can be really helpful – in a work context, things need to get done by certain times.
But when it comes to actually dealing with people, life is full of extenuating circumstances.
Today when I left the house to grab coffee and start my day, I knew something was off.
There was a funny smell in the air.
Los Angeles has lots of funny smells: smog, fire, ass, Chanel No 5, salt, fire’n’ass.
This was not one of those.
This was smoky, but a little sweet, which means it was a car, and if I’m smelling it, it means it was my car.
I pulled my late-90s BMW into the Ralph’s parking lot and smoke billowed out from under the hood, which is never a good sign.
This is not a surprise or a reason to be otherwise dismayed. I collect older cars and every 3-6 months something is bound to go down.
So I followed procedure – get it to the shop, give them the keys, move it along.
Procedure is something I’ve found that helps me from being anxious or impatient (aka weaponized anxiety). You calmly react because you’ve been here before, and anything that pops up you can learn from.
The woman at the dry cleaners looked horrified to see me sitting behind the wheel of a car looking like it was ready to decimate a block of Sarajevo, and luckily the shop’s down the street. For her, procedure was probably “get the fuck away from that thing” but I don’t judge and moved it along.
The car was drivable enough to the shop down the street, so I pulled in, parked, and stepped out to see that my beloved shop was no longer there and had moved.
There was no way in hell I was going to drive a smoking car back over the Cahuenga Pass, so I downloaded my insurance app and requested a tow, downloaded Lyft so I could go pick up my truck, collected what I needed, and got out of the car once the tow was confirmed.
Again, PROCEDURE.
This was not the time my beater pre-early-90s Mercedes lost a wheel on the 5 freeway by Pyramid Lake and shot off sparks.
This was not the time my discount 90s Jaguar billowed smoke on the 99 near Tulare and I had to limp it off a quarter mile into a neighborhood.
This was like a 2 on the “Wyatt’s Car Disasters” Richter scale – a fart in a whirlwind.
As I walked to my Lyft, an angry mechanic from the neighboring shop ran over and started gesturing.
“You can’t just leave this here!”
No, I explained, coolant leak. Truck will be here in 45 minutes.
“Can’t you move it out into the street?!”
No, I explained again – coolant leak. Truck will be here in 45 minutes. Isn’t this guy supposed to be a mechanic?
“Who’s gonna clean up this mess?!”
I’ll send someone, I said. I don’t know why that’s what came to mind first, like I’m gonna call Ghostbusters to clean up green shit, but why was he throwing such a fit about a car parked in front of a completely different business than the one where he works?
He was gearing up for a fourth round of the dipshit tango before I sternly told him “LOOK. 45 minutes. I’ll be back.”
I got into the bewildered Lyft driver’s car and off we went.
I picked up my truck, got an iced coffee to deal with the impending ridiculousness, and returned to the scene of the car-ime.
I parked right in front waiting for the tow truck, which did not arrive. I caught the mechanic hurriedly running out and taking pictures of my car while another one of his fellow mechanics rode a fixie bike around the neighboring businesses, so it clearly was a busy day at the Toyota repair shop.
Minutes, then hours passed. “They’re 15 minutes away!” the cheerful insurance operator told me. All the tracking apps and texts and updates in the world and it didn’t matter one whit. Finally, the exhausted operator said “well, I tried to get ahold of them…and they hung up on me.”
Normally this would be reason to just absolutely lose it. What a waste of a morning – here this whole mess started at nine and now we were past noon.
But what use was it getting angry? The insurance company roadside assistance lady was doing her best. It’s not her fault the towing people sucked.
Besides, what could I actually do about the situation? Nothing worth panicking over. Went back to looking for sunglasses online.
do we like these y/n
At last (past lunch) she was able to dispatch another tow truck driver who said he’d be there in 45 minutes, which was how long it took for him to show up, pick up the car, and get to the mechanic’s shop with the car.
After all, when you have no expectations, people can impress you!
My wonderful mechanic called me a few minutes later when I was at the gym to inform me that there was a shooting at the gas station behind Hollywood and Highland and they couldn’t drop off the car because the police blocked off everything.
He apologized and was able to wave the car in through the war zone to get fixed. Water pump. Easy job.
On the way home I had…well I’ll just share the text I sent to my friend:
The bros were really sweet. They complimented my car, showed me the slip where they bought the equipment to show that it wasn’t stolen, got thrilled when I told them about gaming PCs (“HES A GAMER!!!”) and then were left disappointed when I hustled out of the conversation saying I just bought a setup like what they were trying to sell the week before.
And now I’m home, eating chicken tenders, watching 90s talk show and Sopranos clips on YouTube.
No one got screamed at today, so it was a good day.
Really, the only thing I’ve ever wanted in life is to return to the 90s.
And it seems if I’m patient, we’ll get there soon enough.
