Bad night for cars at the Chevron.

At least the lady said she was going to write the Tribune about the “full service Chevron” because of me, but it wasn’t a great night for cars.

We have our fair share of broken down cars at the gas station.  I’d say we average one car a month that needs to be towed or spend the night.  We got 2 months worth tonight, all in the last hour I was there, a half hour of which was after should have been home.

Lady comes in with a late 90’s Ford Contour.  She’s getting ready for the big storm coming tomorrow*, checking the radiator, oil, transmission fluids.  I help her pick out the right oil, find the transmission dipstick and put in the fluids.  All of which are services we do not officially offer at our self-serve station, but when it’s slow we help where we can.  Her car took 5 quarts of oil.I looked it up online and the official capacity of that car is 4.5 quarts.  That means she even sucked the oil filter dry.  Can we say “Not good for the car”?  Not surprisingly, she made it a block away from the station when it started blowing oil.  Being too far away from home, she came back to the station to seek our advice.  Anybody remember the 1983 video game Spy Hunter by chance?  If not, you are the spy being chased in your car by other spies.  One of the nifty little things your spy car can do is spew a huge cloud of smoke out the tailpipe to blind your followers.  That is what she looked like when she drove back into the parking lot.  My advice to her:  Don’t drive it any more.  So she called a friend to get a ride home and a tow truck to bring it to her mechanic.

Car #2.  Guy with a 2000-something Jeep Grand Cherokee at pump #2 is wandering around the pumps with jumper cables in his hands.  I’m on my way to my car to go home at this point, but figure what the hell, I got out of there early, I can afford to give him a jump start.  It took about 10 minutes and several tries before he gets it started.  I slam his hood so he can keep the Jeep running, he puts it into reverse because my car is in front of him and “carack, slam, whakka, whakka, whakka”.  The driveshaft broke.  Vehicle will not move without a functional driveshaft.  Car #2 down for the count.

At this point I decided I was going to hightail it out of there before my car fell prey to the bad carma (pun intended), and I wished him the best of luck, hopped in the car, quick prayer and headed home.  Good news is that I made it the whole 2 blocks without incident.

*Blizzard warnings, first time in a decade, up to 8” in the valley.  That could mean up to 2’ on the benches and triple that in the mountains.  Huge for Utah.