Baby Jessica and Me

Yesterday I decided that it was warm enough to wash my car and that I would take it through the "touchless" car wash. So I headed back to the office early after my lunch break and I went to this place on what is considered the west side of Marietta, put in my $6 and pulled into the car wash stall.

Now the touchless carwash stall is basically a garage. It has a door when you pull into the stall and a door where you pull out. As your car is being washed both doors are shut, and I the reason for that, I am guessing, so that it keeps all of the water in the stall.

So I sit there as my car is being washed and then the process it complete and the garage door in front of me is supposed to open, I pull out and have a nice clean car. Nice in theory.

Once the car is washed I sit there waiting for the door to open. Waiting. Waiting. The door doesn’t open. I look behind me and the garage door behind me is closed, and it is one of those transparent doors and I can see someone waiting behind me.

So I think, maybe I need to pull forward to activate the door. So I pull forward. Door doesn’t open. Then I think I need to back up then pull forward again. Well I do that, not knowing that the person behind me put their money in for their wash well my car then activates the car wash again. By this time the woman in line behind me drives away.

My car is being washed for a second time, and I realize that I might be stuck here forever. Thoughts go through my head like, “I am going to have to call Renea, she is going to have to call the people who operate the car wash, they are going to have to break down the door to get me out. Baby Jessica gets caught in a well and I get caught in an automatic touchless car wash.”

Then I think/hope that the washing will have to stop and there must be a way to open the doors from the inside. When the second car wash is over I get out of my car, step around the nozzles with water still coming out and see on the wall in front of me a button that says “Emergency Door Open.”

Aahh! I am saved. I hit the button. Nothing.

Stupid emergency door open. Then I look behind me and see buttons on the wall for the back door. I also see that the woman that I thought had abandoned me, to leave me to die in this automatic car wash, had returned. I go hit the buttons on the back doors and the back door opened.

WHEW! I thought I was a goner there for a second. The woman next in line tells me that she talked to the people at the adjacent gas station (that I suppose run the car wash) and they said that I should have left my car still and the doors would open.

Uh huh. Right, like I didn’t try that. Whatever lady, you left me here to die.

She tells me that she will move and I can back out and tell “them” (whoever “them” is) what happened.

I am not telling “them” what happened, who cares about “them.” I have just suffered a traumatic experience. Screw “them.”

So I head back to my car to pull out, and then the front door opens. Yea I guess after a five minute waiting period the door finally does open. NICE.

I relay this story to Renea, and how I almost had to call her to get me removed from the car wash and she can’t stop laughing. Plus when I come home from work she is singing “Working at the Car Wash.”

Don’t you just love sympathy?

I bet Baby Jessica never had to deal with that kind of ridicule.