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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. Man versus machine - a moment frozen in time by J. G. Fabiano There are certain chores one should never attempt in the winter. After living in York for the past 26 years you would think I'd have that figured out by now. The other day my wife complained that her car was so filthy with winter grime that she couldn't see what color it was. I reminded her that the last car we had washed and waxed during the winter months was so badly scratched by the car wash companies we had to take it to an auto body shop in the spring. Then I remembered a new car wash place that just opened in Kittery with one of those machines that uses a self-service spray system to clean off the salt and grime so you have nobody to blame but yourself if anything goes wrong. I knew right away that this was the machine for me. My wife and I found the car wash, went around to the back of the building and parked her car in an open-ended garage. There were a few other people there vacuuming out their cars or wiping off the leftover water left from the car wash. On the ceiling of the stall was a long hose attached to a rotating disc that let you walk around the car with the hose without the hose touching the car itself. I took one look at it and gave myself a dope slap for allowing somebody else to come up with such a marvelous idea. I then went over to the corner of the stall and read the instructions so I could clean my car. The instructions were a little confusing and I couldn't figure out why there were so many different buttons to press so I decided to start simple, put in my quarters and just rinse off my car. I then realized I didn't have enough quarters to make the three bucks necessary to run the machine for four minutes. Imagine my surprise when, next to the stall, I discovered a small service room where I could get change. Except the quarter machine was out of quarters. But, there was a token machine that would dispense tokens for cash, so I spent $10 on eight tokens, figuring I might need them. I guess I can understand why there are no kids outside doing car washes in winter but if they did I think they'd make a lot of money. I put my tokens in the machine; it made a gurgling noise and emitted a thin dribble of water from the nozzle. I then noticed the timer counting down the four minutes at a speed that seemed a lot faster than Fabiano time. I also noticed my wife sitting in the car, watching me and wondering if I would figure out how to put some water on her car before her next birthday. I hurried around the car applying this pathetic stream of water to the thick coat of grime wondering if the hose was set up to run like this because of the sub zero temperatures outside and they didn't want glaciers forming inside their car washes. After three minutes my hands had lost all feeling and there was no noticeable difference to the car except I had turned some of the grime into slurry that was now freezing into a thick gray coat. Then the timer ran out! My wife stared at me in disbelief and I gave her a reassuring smile and told her no problem. I still had some tokens left. I went back to the instructions in the corner of the stall, read them again and realized I had not pressed the right buttons. I turned and gave my wife the thumbs up, put in the tokens, pressed the right buttons in the right sequence and was lifted off my feet, hurled six feet backward and slammed against the wall. A powerful jet of water lashed around the stall, blasting everything in sight, pounding the car with the force of Niagara Falls. My wife was nowhere to be seen. I guessed she had thrown herself onto the floor of the car. I struggled to bring the hose under control, wishing I had a couple of York fire fighters there to help me out. The science teacher in me came to the fire as I realized that for each every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I felt like I was wrestling a giant anaconda during a torrential downpour up the Amazon. I could not believe how difficult it was to control. As I struggled to keep my balance I was pushed around the car wash like a garbage can in a hurricane. Outside I saw people running in every direction as great whooshing jets of water shot out of the building trying to make them part of the frozen landscape. If I could just get this thing trained on the car, I thought, it would take the grime off in about two seconds and maybe some of the paint. Back and forth I struggled across the stall, literally bouncing off one wall to the other. I noticed my wife's head had peaked back into view through the window and she was laughing hysterically. I finally got a good grip with both hands and wrestled the bulging hose into some kind of submission. I planted my feet squarely on the ground and trained the jet at the car. Then I realized I was moving very steadily backwards out of the stall. I had by now succeeded in covering the floor with so much water it had turned into an ice rink and I was sliding across it like an out of control Zamboni. I tried to jam myself against the wall and aim the nozzle directly at the car. Unfortunately I succeeded and rediscovered another long forgotten science lesson; water propelled with force onto a hard surface is inclined to bounce off and propel itself back in the direction from which it came. The torrent of water, only slightly diffused by its impact with the car, hit me with such force I thought it would scour my beard right off my face. My cheeks vibrated so hard that my yell of pain sounded like Donald Duck having his butt rubbed against a washboard at about 5,000 revs per minute. I swung the hose down and succeeded only in hosing myself from top to bottom. I was instantly drenched and, because it was so cold, the water immediately began to form ice crystals. I looked down at my clothes and realized I was starting to look like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz. My wife told me later that I looked like a knight in shining armor fighting a losing battle with a dragon that breathed not fire but ice. I knew that my only hope for survival was the timer and I prayed for my tokens in the machine to run out. It felt like I had been fighting this infernal water demon for hours not minutes. I strained through the ice fog to see the timer and saw that I still had three minutes to go. For a minute I was tempted to drop the damn thing and run outside like everybody else but I knew I would never hear the last of it if I left my wife alone in the car with the serpent from hell, even though she was almost paralyzed with laughter. Finally the machine spit its last drop of water. Finally I stopped sliding around the car wash. Finally I let the hose slip from my cramped fingers. I strained to see through the ice that had formed on my glasses and when I scraped away the glaze realized that the force of the water had cracked one of the lenses. I looked down at myself and saw that there were actually icicles hanging off me. I shook them off me and they fell to the floor with a tinkling sound. I walked over to the car, scraped the ice from a window and saw that my wife was at that stage where she was so weak she couldn't laugh anymore and was struggling to catch her breath between faint, delirious sobs. I looked around and saw that I had created a kind of frozen Armageddon all around me, an ice cave with my wife's car at the center, its coat of winter grime still miraculously untouched. I realized then that there are some chores one should never attempt in winter - and washing the car comes top of the list! The End
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