The Annual Water Fest
It’s that time of year again.
It’s time for the car to get its annual car wash and clean.
Now I don’t mind the wash bit. I just drive up to the nearest machine which is only a few miles away and sit for a few minutes worrying if my wing mirrors are going to fall off. Though I had better put the battery back into the car first, I suppose? Cars tend not start very easily without a battery, unlike the Good Old Days when cars had starter handles that you inserted through the front bumper.
When I have that done and have returned home, then that’s where the real work starts. The removal of about ten dogs of hairs from the inside. We only have the one pooch but she sheds enough for ten, and the hairs tend to drift into damned awkward corners and crevices where the vacuum cleaner won’t reach. It’s a back breaking thankless task but it has to be done. Then there are all the other bits of shit that tend to accumulate in a car, such as scrumpled up parking tickets, some loose change and several hundredweight of gravel from the front drive that get carried in on my shoes.
I have never worked out why dog hairs are so fucking sticky. They cling to the carpet, or indeed any material as if they were woven into the fabric. A vacuum will get the loose stuff but any kind of brush just seems to embed them further. I have a “magic” brush with slanted bristles which is quite good though. The trick is to brush it the right way, or otherwise it will just dump its load on the carpet again. And even after vacuuming and brushing there is always a sheen of hairs left embedded. Seeing as I am not going to pick them out with tweezers they’ll just have to stay there.
Maybe I should shave the dog?
All I can say is that I’m glad it’s only once a year.
So I have a busy day ahead.
Talk amongst yourselves.
“They cling to the carpet”
The Bestes Frau In The World And Beyond sheds like a whole pack of what I refer to (translated out of German) as ‘street beshitting machines’ . It started after having kids and she is now bald…almost.
I asked a carpet cleaner specialist years back,decades ago, why our then living room carpet was impossible to de-hair. Apparently it is a ‘static electricity’ thing? His suggestion was to have The Bestes Frau’s polarity reversed which having two (‘bipolar’ get it?) isn’t really an option although perhaps you could negatively charge your dog…and the cat for good measure?
That actually raises an interesting conundrum.
If the car is charged positively, and I give Penny the same polarity then the hairs will be repelled by the upholstery which would work. However, surely Penny would also be repelled by the car so presumably she would float in mid air in the car? And if I made the mistake of opening the car door, she would shoot out like a cork from a champagne bottle? That would be an interesting spectacle.
And if I gave the cat a negative charge, dog and cat would become inseparable friends? Literally!
The dog hair is an unsolvable problem. So I don’t try to solve it any more. For the dirty back windows where doggy resides while on the road, I’ve found the perfect solution in form of a sticker: “My windows aren’t dirty, it’s my border collie’s nose art”. Good solution, no? 😉
Lately the car test people are getting extremely fussy about dog hairs. I am convinced it’s just another method of extracting further fees for re-tests, as it has fuck all to do with road worthiness. I doubt they would have any kind of artistic appreciation.
My girlfriend’s collie was in the boot-part of the car recently and now it’s covered in B&W hairs which are stuck to the fabric. I think the problem is the fabric itself – a kind of felt-like substance which resists all attempts to remove attached detritus. Perhaps the car manufacturers have access to special, maybe alien, materials which bond mysteriously to all discarded hairyness.
I think I may have found the solution. Well, maybe not a solution, but a way to profit. If I put dog hairs on one side of my coat and car fabric on the other, then it would save on buttons? I could call it something like “Welcro”?
My first car – an Austin A35 pick-up which I bought for £15 from some gypsies – never had a functioning battery which would hold a charge, and as new batteries were expensive items (probably as much as I paid for the car) I always started it with the handle. Surprisingly (amazingly, even), it started really easily with just one or two cranks, even on cold mornings. Dunno why they did away with those starter handles. They were a boon to us budget motorists.
Blame the Mini!! If I remember correctly, that was the first car to have a transverse engine, and all others followed suit. Many’s the time I have wished for a starter handle though.