motor vehicles

An unlikely crowd of weary travelers shuffles into the waiting room of the Motor Vehicles Inspection Station, convinced this place must be one of the circles of hell Dante neglected to mention. They rest their tired and aggravated heads against the paned glass of the closet-sized room, in utter distress and despair. There is a Japanese man of about twenty-five, decked in trends from haircut to shoes. A middle-aged woman with graying brown hair sits with her legs crossed on a bench, reading The New Yorker, her glasses falling off the tip of her nose. An Indian man, unshaven and dressed in a wrinkled work t-shirt, stands anxiously near the first door, for his car has already failed two consecutive times. He is talking to a friendly older man with gray hair and a cheerful expression. A middle-aged mother and her daughter enter and stand in the corner, the first with blonde highlighted hair and tanned freckled skin, the latter with long brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail at her neck.

The friendly man is the first to go, dashing towards his car as soon as the attendant pulls it into the lot. Silence ensues afterwards, the Indian man worrying about his inevitable failure (especially since one of his lights was recently re-attached with duct tape) and the older woman vainly trying to read her magazine. The entrance of a heavy middle-aged woman with short red hair wearing a bright flowered suit interrupts the peace, and soon after the mother notices a strange machine that makes the tires spin. The rubber tires make whirring sounds as the air jets under them.

“What are they doing?” the mother asks, partly to start conversation and partly out of real concern.

“I don’t know,” says the woman with the book, glad to have a distraction from the page, “I was wondering the same thing myself.”

Now the adults move forward to solve the great mystery of the whirring tires. Seeing as how none of the women are very educated in automobile inspection, the flowered woman asks the Japanese man what he thinks (for the Indian man is still silent with worry) and all faces turn toward him.

The Japanese man is unprepared and disoriented, and dumbly states, “I don’t know.” Then as he gets the feeling he should have known something about this particular topic, he makes a feeble attempt to retrieve the dignity and manhood he’s lost with, “Well, umm, it could be the shocks.” This remark is even unconvincing to himself, despite whether it holds truth or not, and the women satisfy themselves with the flowered woman’s solution of alignment. With this mystery solved, the women proceeded to groan about the service of the station and endlessly gripe about their experiences. They exchange petty tragedies of their troubles in the automobile industry, chattering with no intention but to waste time and complain. Even the Japanese man in pink blouse and black sunglasses indignantly offers his own stories of frustration. The Indian man seems happy to leave, until the attendant tells him to bring his car into the re-inspection station—then his face falls. And the daughter, although not speaking a word, silently finds the entire experience to be completely and utterly amusing.