I was driving home very late at night in a blinding snowstorm when I noticed it.
My car was on a upgrade and the engine began to labour. Then cough and grunt and moan.
All of a sudden my motor began to sound like a truck engine. And not just any truck engine. It began to sound like the engine on one of those trucks owned by young men who seem to feel the need to prove to the world that they are extremely well-endowed, if in no other way at least in the vehicular sense.
What was once a whisper-quiet compact car became a deep-throated, throbbing, testosterone-laden growling beast. I hoped that once I got to the top of the hill it would settle down and stop embarrassing me, but no joy. It was just as loud on the flats.
I pulled over and stopped when I found a safe side road. I got out, knelt in the snow, and checked under the car to see if I in fact still had anything that looked like a muffler.
I probably did. I say "probably" because I really had no idea what I was searching for. To be honest, I might as well not have bothered. I wouldn't have recognized anything but the most obvious problem, like, say, a human being lodged in my suspension.
And if, in fact, I was dragging a piece of muffler around, I wouldn't have had a remedy. I wasn't about to call anyone that late at night, there was nobody else foolish enough to be out on the road in those conditions, and I sure wasn't going to abandon the car in a drift and walk home.
But I looked anyway, and nothing seemed out of place. I couldn't swear to that, of course. But there were no stray body parts and everything under the car looked like stuff you might find under a car, so I got back in and continued on my throbbing, coughing, growling way.
I took the car into my muffler place after the weekend. (I say "my muffler place" because I have had a number of muffler malfunctions over the years I have had this car, and I always take it to a particular shop because I like their service. I also call it "my muffler place" because for all the money I put into it, I feel I own at least half the shop.)
One of the reasons I go to this shop is that they offer a lifetime guarantee on their products and workmanship. So I show up bright and early Monday morning, and tell my buddy Murray that I have had a muffler failure. But that's okay, because I went through this a few months ago, and for only a few hundred bucks I got a new muffler that has a lifetime guarantee. So, my good man, bring ye hence my new muffler, and I shall be on my way in a trice.
Well, not so fast.
Murray looked at his computer screen. "Ah," he said.
"Ah?"
"Well, back in October we replaced your resonating defragultion clamp. That was a real problem. Made your car sound like a truck. But what's happened here is you've got a rusted out catatonic forgulator. So, different problem."
"But still, sounds like a truck," I said. "Now - just a hunch - this is not covered under the lifetime warranty?"
"Sadly, no."
"And back in June of 2008? When my car made exactly this same noise?"
"That was your peremptory flap chamber resonator. Completely different part of the system. It's working just fine."
It seems no matter what section of the muffler I get fixed, there are always a few dozen more getting ready to give out, each one covered by a lifetime warranty that covers none of the others. If I were a cat, my car would have more lifetime warranties than I had lives.
I don't blame my muffler shop, and I certainly don't blame Murray. It's not his fault that car companies design our vehicles to become mobile profit centres. I have tiny lights on my dash that come on and might as well just say, "There's nothing really wrong with your car, but your mechanic's daughter just got braces, so bring the vehicle in and he will charge you $25 to turn this light off."
Well, there wasn't much to do but pay a few hundred bucks to get it fixed. But I tell you what, next time my car starts sounding like a truck, I'm going to go underneath and plug the holes in the muffler with my warranty certificates.
Either that or cut off the trunk lid. If it's going to sound like one, the least it can do is look like one.
