Life in the Tow Lane

The weekend storm has certainly taken its toll on motorists, and I saw this afternoon that you were another hapless victim, stalled by the side of the road.

I am curious to know why you, and countless others that I saw, decided, after several fruitless efforts to start your truck, to lift the hood and peer inside. Yours seemed to be a fairly new truck, and as I recall from the last time I looked under my hood, there really isn't very much to see.

Whenever I buy a new car, car salesmen always want to open the hood to show me what's inside, and it strikes me that all I ever see is a big black plastic thing that pretty much covers up all the other metal and plastic things that hide in the spots where the engine block, air cleaner and carburetor used to live, back when I was a kid. They even colour code the spouts for the oil, washer fluid and coolant, because they're just not that obvious anymore.

A reputable mechanic that I know tells me that you pretty much need a diagnostic computer to do any work at all on these new engines, and you need a different one for each make of car.

So, were you just checking to see if your big, black plastic thing was still there, or did you hold out some vain hope that the problem lay with one of the three things that you could identify? I suppose that there was an outside chance that your engine failure was directly attributable to a low washer fluid level.

I suspect that, like me, you felt that you had to at least try to look manly until you broke down and called the Roadside Assistance number.