Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Ask Jeeves
Do you think Acura drivers have a certain haughtiness to them? I don't think so. I think Acura drivers are people who like the reliability and user-friendliness of Hondas but don't want something as generic as a Honda, so they step up to the luxury division. But maybe I feel that way because I own one.
I need new wipers desperately. Mine are squeaking and streaking and the right one is doing that shredding thing where it looks like it's one or two swipes away from disappearing and scratching across my windsheild with the metal arm.
So we stop at Wal-Mart on the way home last night to remedy this situaiton and I go in there figuring they'll have a computer at the auto area and will be able to tell me which wipers I need, size-wise. Well, that desk was closed. So my lovely wife manages to find one of those little books near the wipers that supposedly has every make and model car so you can do it yourself. We study the book and learn that the earliest pages are tattered and the soonest car, alphabetically-speaking, that we can find is "AM General." Acura would come before that, for you slow-learners.
Shit.
So I go back out to my car and dig out my manual and head back in, lipping through the index looking for wiper info. I find the pages for windsheild wipers and turn there (in my 300-page manual, by the way). And do you know what's there? Step-by-step retard directions for changing the wipers, including how to pull the arm away from the windsheild, but nothing about the size. I check elsewhere and there are two pages on, I kid you not, the wiper control stalk.
Seriously? Nowhere are we going to tell people the size wipers they need to buy? Is it expected that Acura owners will simply take the car in -- or have the butler do it or something -- and let the blue-collar service people handle it? So frustrating.
I wound up searching Google via by blackberry and found a page for my car that said the size was 600MM. Of course, here in America, they're generally measured in inches. So I bought the inches equivalent, 24, and headed home.
And they were wrong. Both of them. One is 22 inches and the other is 19.
I'm an idiot.
I need new wipers desperately. Mine are squeaking and streaking and the right one is doing that shredding thing where it looks like it's one or two swipes away from disappearing and scratching across my windsheild with the metal arm.
So we stop at Wal-Mart on the way home last night to remedy this situaiton and I go in there figuring they'll have a computer at the auto area and will be able to tell me which wipers I need, size-wise. Well, that desk was closed. So my lovely wife manages to find one of those little books near the wipers that supposedly has every make and model car so you can do it yourself. We study the book and learn that the earliest pages are tattered and the soonest car, alphabetically-speaking, that we can find is "AM General." Acura would come before that, for you slow-learners.
Shit.
So I go back out to my car and dig out my manual and head back in, lipping through the index looking for wiper info. I find the pages for windsheild wipers and turn there (in my 300-page manual, by the way). And do you know what's there? Step-by-step retard directions for changing the wipers, including how to pull the arm away from the windsheild, but nothing about the size. I check elsewhere and there are two pages on, I kid you not, the wiper control stalk.
Seriously? Nowhere are we going to tell people the size wipers they need to buy? Is it expected that Acura owners will simply take the car in -- or have the butler do it or something -- and let the blue-collar service people handle it? So frustrating.
I wound up searching Google via by blackberry and found a page for my car that said the size was 600MM. Of course, here in America, they're generally measured in inches. So I bought the inches equivalent, 24, and headed home.
And they were wrong. Both of them. One is 22 inches and the other is 19.
I'm an idiot.
Labels: being an idiot starring ME
