Clash over car wash

After moving out of my parents’ home and living in with my wife in our own new home, I felt a sense of empowerment. I clean the house (thankfully it’s a small townhouse with less than 150 sqm of living space), vacuum, sweep and mop the floors, do the dishes, prepare meals, take out the trash, etc., while my wife goes to work earlier than I and usually comes homes a wee bit later. My wife spent a significant portion of her life in Toronto, Canada, and my folks always said I was a neat freak so we both thought we would try living without household help, American-style so to speak. Every day I end up very tired because I tend to clean the house twice: first in the morning, fixing our bedroom, getting our things for the day ready, and the cleaning part itself. Our place is unusually dusty due to its proximity to construction sites in the area; dust, cement and sand will always find their way into our home. Hence, I have to clean it up again in the evening, before I prepare for dinner. You are probably thinking: What the hell does cleaning the house have to do with cars?!

Well, I am ashamed to admit that, as much as I love cars and driving, tuning/modifying/maintaining/repairing them, I am a useless tool when it comes to these things. I always leave the work to professionals, while I research, gather knowhow and information, and supervise the work done on my cars and even other peoples’ cars, and test them out to check if everything is well and good. But the simplest of non-driving but motoring-related skills, cleaning cars, is something I just utterly, miserably fail at, at an epic level of biblical proportions. The few times I’ve tried cleaning my cars, my dad, mom, drivers and household helpers all commented that I ended up wasting a lot of water, made the surrounding environment (i.e., my parents’ garage) much dirtier. And the worst part is, my car was even dirtier than when I started, with lots of streaks of dirt, water spots and stains. I’m fine with certain things, I might be even good at others. But cleaning cars is one of my worst skills, ever.

Hence, after moving out, the first few days were focused on cleaning the house and the cars (my wife’s and mine) were left to gather dust as we furiously cleaned the house as best as we could. But after our cars were covered in dust so thick it was like  straight out of a horror movie set (I’ve had consecutive test units since we’ve moved to our new home and my car was unused for weeks), I thought I’d look for a car wash in our area. Our home is nestled between the boundary of San Juan and Mandaluyong near Wack Wack so I thought with the amount of affluent people living in the area, there should be a handful of car washes. But it was long weekend of November—All Saints//All Souls’ Day—and many of the car washes were closed. The few ones open had between 5-7 cars lined up, and I needed to get home soon to prepare dinner. I went around our area a few times until finally, I found one tucked up in a sleepy, quiet area of our neighborhood.

I was so happy the car wash boys cleaned my Yaris so thoroughly, they cleaned the inside and out really well, wiped the interior panels, vacuumed the seats and carpet and of course foam washed the exterior, that my car felt squeaky clean. Leaving the car wash, I drove home three blocks away so carefully, parked the car and took the Chevrolet Sonic test unit, which had also gathered quite a lot of dust and brought it to the car wash to have it cleaned. It struck me that the big-name car wash shops make a lot of money because they are very systematic, organized and professional and methodological in their approach to cleaning cars. But that doesn’t mean that the simple, no-name brand car washes run by entrepreneurs like Boyet and Carding cannot clean your car properly and thoroughly. They just have less fancy equipment, a more modest shop and no coffee bar to serve you cold iced coffee while you wait. (Oh, and you tend to wait just a wee bit longer since they don’t have a compressor to blow out the air and make drying faster). But it’s fine, cleaning cars should be savored as you see your ride transformed like new.