Part of me wants to buff the heck out of the paint on my London Black Cab. To see the fruits of my labor as I restore the shine from the oxidized depths of the paint that is probably older than me. I can picture the satisfaction, the montage of clips in which the progression of time is displayed as different sky colors.
Then I look at my life and the crazy day job that I purport to devote much of my day time to, and try to superimpose a “9-5 with extensive breaks to meet people and negotiate and look at houses” window frame around it, and suddenly the montage looks a little dull. And choppy.
So while part of me is researching orbital or high speed buffing machines (do I go with air powered or electric motor?) and thinking of the cost savings of having such a machine at my disposal seeing as I seem to buy and sell a car on the average about every 10 months in the US, another part of me is thinking of finding a professional who can do it all for me.
Then a third part of me is saying ya-boo sucks to the “do it yourself” and the “hire a pro” parts of me, and wants to hire an unskilled laborer to toil away in my garage for me. So that I don’t have to do it. And it’s cheap. And I don’t have to get my taxi very far away.
Sure, I enjoy driving my cab around the 30MPH speed limit neighborhood, when my comfort-zone speed of 25MPH seems positively daring. I’ve taken it out twice in the last 11 weeks, with the clutch finally serving part of the purpose it was designed to. Hurrah! Driving it across town is a different matter. Not least of all as I don’t really know how it will behave, and I have to fit such things around picking up kids and meeting clients, neither of whom seem to appreciate a no-show due to a gear stick coming off in my hand.
On average, the gearstick comes out of the gearbox every second time I attempt to put the car in reverse gear – a maneuver entailing lifting the stick and pulling it towards the driver’s seat.
So hiring a pro who does house calls seems to be the answer.