The Squeaky Wheel

The brakes on my mother’s car squeaked very loudly. I’d be sitting on the steps in front of school, or waiting at the little league field, or standing in front of the theater, and I’d hear this faint squeaking sound grow louder and LOUDER! as her car weaved its way through the stop-and-go traffic eventually culminating in a horrific fingernails-on-the-chalkboard shrieking squeak as it stopped right in front of me. And in front of my classmates, my teammates, my friends.

For a sensitive and socially insecure kid, riding around in a shitty car was bad enough; riding around in a shitty car that loudly proclaimed its shittiness to one and all was unbearable.

Flash forward thirty years as I pull my expensive sports/luxury car into the parking garage, roll the window down and slow the car to wave my parking card in front of the reader, and I hear this sharp squeak. I let up on the brakes, the squeak stops, then I hit the brakes hard, and the squeak shrieks LOUDLY!

Shit!

So the next morning as I sit across from the Service Consultant in the dealership’s tastefully-appointed Customer Service Center, cradling a free cup of freshly-ground Kona coffee as my eyes scan over the laminated Ten Point Satisfaction Plan while soothing mood music wafts unobtrusively from expensive speakers hidden in the ceiling, the whole operation exuding the rarified status and refinement we’ve come to associate with our expensively-engineered and decidedly non-shitty automobiles, I expect an understanding reception.

“My brakes squeak.”

“According to our key read, your pads are 6 mm. We don’t service them until they’re down to 3 mm.”

“But they squeak very loudly.”

“We can look at it if you want, but it would be outside the warranty. And brake work’s really expensive, thousands. You don’t want to go there.”

“But my expensive car sounds like a shitty car.”

“I’m sorry, but if it’s not a safety issue, we can’t do anything under the warranty. Bring it back when the pads are at 3 mm, and we’ll try to fix it.”

“So loudly squeaking brakes are a standard feature of your cars? Is that your position?”

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

As I so often do in situations like these, I wonder, should I make a stink? Should I attempt to work the system, maneuver around the impregnable Platinum Customer Warranty Policy? Should I raise my voice, pound her desk, adopt my most crazed look and demand to speak with the Customer Service Manager? Should I threaten them with the nuclear option – giving them a “4” instead of a “5” on my next Customer Satisfaction Evaluation Form? Should I fire off an angry letter to the regional VP for Customer Experience? Should I picket the dealership, my signboard announcing “Squeaky Brakes Sold Here” while ear-piercing shrieking feedback blares incessantly from my megaphone?

And as I so often do in situations like these, I remain cool calm collected as I skulk away, the thought bubble that just read “Hey, life’s too short” switching to furiously-scribbled squiggly lines.

Driving in to work, my mind races through calculations. If my wife and I live to 80, and if we continue to buy or lease two expensive cars every three or four years for the rest of our lives, without accounting for the time value of money, we’ll spend just under $1 million on cars.

One million dollars! That’s 100,000,000 pennies. And not one of those pennies will ever be paid to these purveyors of squeaky-braked cars.

That makes me feel better, a little, as I exit the freeway and zoom down the ramp that deposits me in the middle lane of the street that leads to my parking garage and I signal to merge into the left lane so I can turn into my parking garage and this car speeds up so I can’t get in and I speed up to make an opening and it speeds up too and then I slow down and it slows down too and I look back and it’s a woman behind the wheel fixing me with a look that could kill and now the parking garage entrance is just 200 feet away and I’m thinking – no, I am not thinking, I am reacting – this is my last chance and I stomp on the gas pedal and swerve to the left and look back in satisfaction as she slams on her brakes as I squeak by.

No longer cool calm collected, adrenaline coursing through my brain, I turn into the parking garage, roll my window down and hit the brakes hard as I approach the card reader. SQUEAK! I look up and there she is, in the lane next to mine, so I roll down the passenger window too and yell out over my loudly squeaking brakes: “WOULD IT KILL YOU TO LET ME IN?”

The parking attendant looks startled, his “Good morning!” so abruptly interrupted. She tosses an “Asshole!” at me and rolls her window up, giving me just enough time to lob a “Bitch!” in before she drives away.

Riding up in the elevator, adrenaline receding, a crazed satisfaction settling over me, I survey my eventful morning. Who was that guy? Whatever happened to the cool calm collected me?

The doors open and I stride out into my day, chin up, the squiggly lines in my thought bubble now replaced with “Better late than never.”

Hey, life’s too short.