Mechanic’s Tale: Mechanics Gone Wild!

Somewhere, somehow, you may have gotten the impression that mechanics are sexist pigs with pictures of scantily clad women adorning their tool boxes and bathrooms, secretly or not so secretly ogling every woman who walks through the door.

You would for the most part be correct. Even the sitcom Seinfeld, which seemed to hit about every topic, had an episode centered on dirty talk down at the garage.

Why this is, no one knows. It could be that the garage remains one of the last all-male bastions in this country. It could be a genetic quirk of the people drawn into this business. Maybe it’s just “cars and girls” — the American dream.

Slowly, with the realization that it might be costing us money, the most obvious displays of this Neanderthal mentality have been squeezed out or at least driven underground. Snap-on Tools no longer gives out their swimsuit calendars, or their famous beer mugs and clocks (which I gave up years ago in the grand gesture of a devoted husband), and most garage owners are painfully aware of the possibility of lawsuits, which carry a much bigger penalty than an enraged boyfriend or husband.

But she already paid

Back in my Precision Tune era, a friend ran a shop in a fairly affluent Maryland suburb. His mechanics, like most others, had their subtle ways. If they found a woman attractive, they would be sure to park her car at the bottom of the lot so she would have to walk across all five bays, giving them the chance to have one final look. But one of the mechanics lacked all subtlety, making crude remarks and giving leering looks to women in the shop waiting room, even while trying to sell them repair work.

Now Jack was a very loyal and valuable employee, so my friend had a long talk with him about how important women were as customers, and how the shop depended on their money to stay in business — so it was crucial not do anything to make them uncomfortable or less willing to spend money.

Jack seemed to understand and wanted ever so much to please his boss, so the matter was considered resolved until several days later, when Jack was seen at the shop bay door hooting and hollering at the top of his lungs at a woman walking to her car. My friend was horrified, yanked Jack away from the door and dragged him back to the office to find out what it was that Jack hadn’t understood. Jack said very sincerely, “Its okay! She’s already paid us.” Later when the woman showed up with reinforcements, Jack hid in the parts room while my friend tried to calm down the fuming husband.

I like ’em big and stupid

Sometimes real relationships can start, if you want to call them that. Word must have gotten out that the local garage is a good place to find a man who is young and able. I’m a little slow on the uptake, so it had to be pointed out to me once that a certain married lady was coming by the shop once or twice a week right at lunch time, and a certain mechanic always, after looking at some insignificant problem on her car, took lunch.

In another case, a one-time regular customer, a woman whose husband we knew to be overseas, seemed to be going through elaborate contortions to get the attention of one of my employees who fit the bill of the Julie Brown classic, “I like ’em big and stupid.” Fortunately he was too dumb to catch on early enough to get into much trouble before the husband’s return.

These “relationships” never have good middles or ends. Often in these types of affairs, drinking or drugs are involved, so when the guy comes back from “lunch” he’s no good to the shop for the rest of the day.

And when the excitement has fizzled, you will inevitably lose the customer. You also risk the shop getting a reputation as Home Wreckers, Inc. The mechanic’s wife or girlfriend will eventually get wise, as will the customer’s husband.

I had one mechanic quit just to extract himself from such a relationship, and another whose wife came to the shop with a gun.

Even in Mayberry

One of my first bosses grew up in the business working at his father’s gas station in the early Seventies. He told me stories about some of the techniques the pump jockeys used, one of the most memorable being aggressive windshield washing (shaking the car side to side while looking down through the windshield).

They were located very near CIA headquarters, and often the secretaries who worked there would use the restroom as a changing station to get out of their work clothes before going out on the town. Somehow the guys had rigged up a mirror system so they could watch this from the men’s room. Now the CIA might not be able to find a Russian spy working at their front desk, but one of those secretaries had a boyfriend who figured out what was going on, burst into the men’s room and chased Goober into the woods where he remained hidden for several hours.

Positive reinforcement

Along every step of my journey in auto repair, until about the mid-Nineties, this behavior was not only tolerated, it was reinforced. When I was in school at Motech, Chrysler’s mechanic’s school, I remember an instructor trying sincerely to explain how becoming good, technically knowledgeable employees would buy us the equity we would need on that inevitable day we left work for several unscheduled hours of customer appreciation.

I remember the time at the Ford dealership when, as a birthday surprise, the guys sent a stripper—posing as an irate customer—into the service manager’s office, then watched the ensuing fun. And it wasn’t the only time I saw strippers performing in shops though, come to think of it, that may have been an Eighties thing.

But lest you fear sending your wife or daughter into a shop, that era, I assure you, is over. But regressing just a little, I do remember one gag I loved. Back again to that Precision Tune era when there were twenty-plus shops in the area servicing twenty, forty, or fifty cars a day, each of the girls at the front desk got used to hearing complaints, some legitimate but some plain crazy. When I needed to talk to another manager, if I got a new girl on the phone I would begin “I had my car in there last month for a tune-up and now my daughter’s pregnant!” At no time did any receptionist rise to the defense of the shop. Instead there was dead silence as she scanned out across the shop trying to figure out which of the shop’s Neanderthals had stolen my daughter’s honor.

Note to editor: After writing about my many colorful receptionists, I thought the mechanics at least deserved equal time. I promise the next column will cover an actual technical topic.