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It's hardly worth getting your car cleaned when you live in the countryside. I am very bad at doing it myself and just seem to smear the dirt around and make things worse. Every now and again I am ashamed of looking like the car in Whacky Races that was continuously shrouded in a cloud of dirt (which upon looking up, I discover that I have entirely imagined) and take it to get cleaned. The place where I usually go pretty much always dirt shame me. The man in charge looks glumly at my dirty car and cannot hide his disgust as he says ‘Your car is very dirty.†This is his way of telling me that it's going to cost me more, but it turns out to be a bad tactic for a person whose job is to clean cars to be visible annoyed when a dirty car comes in to his carwash. Dirty cars are what he needs. People with clean cars are not going to use his service. He doesn't need to make them feel good and he shouldn't make people with dirty cars feel bad. He should welcome them with open arms. Perhaps he's hoping that by shaming people with really dirty cars, they will come back before their car gets really dirty and thus provide him with more work. But it's a miscalculation. If he doesn't like dirty cars (and specifically then making them not dirty) then he is in the wrong business.
The last time my car was almost too dirty to safely drive I happened to be in a supermarket car park where there was a car cleaning business and I took the opportunity to get the filth off the outside. They didn't judge me and in fact when the man saw how filthy the inside of the car was he looked very happy, almost salivating and saying if I came back he could sort all of that out too (I was in too much of a rush to do it straight away, but also knew I would need to tidy off the surface detritus and strewn plastic bags and stuff before he could do it.
So this morning, after dropping the kids off, I took out their car seats, emptied the boot, removed the larger items of broken toys and food and went to get my car cleaned. I sat in the cafe and wrote my blog. The lady in the cafe asked if anyone wanted a free cappuccino. It had been made, but was no longer required (maybe they'd made the wrong drink) and otherwise they'd have to pour it down the drain. I had a coffee already, but I can always manage another coffee. I got two coffees for the price of one. I only needed another 9 coffees and this trip would pay for itself.
The car was almost unrecognisable. There's not much point in cleaning the inside either, but it was amazing to see it crumb and dirt free. I could pretend it was almost new.
Crucially no one working at the car wash gave me the stink eye for my filthy car. And they had every right to. It was horrible. But they maybe want me to return so they just pretended that having a car full of crumbs and coated in shit was normal.
But after picking the kids up and taking them to two separate swimming lessons it pretty much looked the same as before the clean by the end of the day. But what a 10 minutes of having a clean car it was.
My message though, to anyone who runs a business. Don't shame people for wanting to use your services. Actually, it's a lesson I need to learn too. Maybe I should stop calling my audience weirdo nerds who can't get a partner.
But then again, you shouldn't lie to your customers either.
