Ralph and the squeezers

Some people name their cars terms of endearment like Marge, Doris, Dave or Herbie the Love Bug.

I call my car Ralph, as in, what I want to do every time I see another repair bill.

The repair guys’ eyes light up whenever they see me drive up. It may be because they think they’re going to get a big check. Or they could be hoping that I will have again tried a repair in the driveway, which gives them a chance to ride in like heroes and fix the damages.

The last time I went to pick up Ralph, and pay the bill, I found a pair of squeezers on the driver’s side floor. Being an honest man, and since it was only a $1.99 tool, I turned the squeezers in at the front counter.

“Pliers,” the woman behind the counter kindly informed me. “Car repair shops don’t use ‘pliers’ anymore.”

The mechanic, standing nearby, after he caught his breath from laughing over the “squeezers” reference, told me he had found the pliers inside the engine compartment. I had apparently left them there during some aborted attempt to fix Ralph, and they had been riding, snugly if less than secure, for several thousand miles.

Now the Wonder Woman (aka my girlfriend) and I have a lot in common. But not car knowledge. She is the daughter of a mechanic. When she starts talking cars, she throws around words like cylinder, clutch assembly, timing belt, air wrench, fuel injection cleaners and the like.

When I start talking about cars, I also use highly technical, scientific, mechanical terms, like whatchamajiggy, gizmo and thingamajig.

It’s like she’s from Venus and I’m from mechanical Mars.

I’m not mechanically gifted. For instance, when I want to give my old car that new car smell and try to attach an air freshener to the rearview mirror, I occasionally get in a wrestling match — and find the tree getting the upper hand.

Growing up, I learned to drive hay trucks held together by baling wire and prayer. We ignored most sounds. The trucks would backfire like Communist propaganda machines. The trucks would occasionally give off horrible screeching noises — or maybe that was a cousin whose back was going out trying to heave a 100-pound bale.

The hay trucks would shimmy, wobble and wheeze down the road, do everything but spill the load of hay on its way to feed the cows that were eating us into bankruptcy.

The Wonder Woman, by contrast, has been trained by her dad to hear every out-of-the-ordinary sound her car makes and get it fixed before a problem becomes a crisis.

She demands excellence from her vehicles.

I am just happy if Ralph gets me down the road so I can drive by the car repair shop and wave at the nice mechanics.

They rarely see me. They’re too busy rolling on the ground ruining their coveralls laughing at the guy who was kind enough to leave “squeezers” in the engine compartment.

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