Christine was running her father’s car repair workshop. He had been a mechanic in the army and when he was demobbed in 1955 he used his skills and experience to set up ‘Bob’s Garage’. People trusted Bob with their prized possessions and he had treated each car as an honoured guest while he mended and serviced them. Before returning the cars to their owners each one was also washed and polished: customer service and satisfaction was very important to Bob and it was no surprise that he was never short of work.
Bob had passed on his love of cars to Christine from an early age. He had shown her how to strip down an engine and in doing so explained the workings of the internal combustion engine. She instantly fell in love with cars and engines. By the time she was 12 Christine was working alongside her dad at weekends and in school holidays. She loved nothing more than getting her hands greasy and sorting out wherever cough and splutter the car had come in with. When she left school Christine was apprenticed to her father and became an accomplished mechanic in her own right. She never tired of seeing the surprised look on people’s faces when they came into the garage to talk to the mechanic and saw her in her greasy overalls. There weren’t many female mechanics when Christine started.
Now Christine was running Bob’s Garage. Now she was the head mechanic and had apprentices working for her. Christine tried to maintain Bob’s values and treat each car as an honoured guest: each car still left the workshop having been repaired, washed and polished. But she had to admit that she was struggling. There were so many electronic gizmos and gadgets in modern cars. Instead of diagnosing a problem using her eyes and ears and years of experience she had to plug the car into a diagnostic computer to find out what was wrong, and it was becoming more difficult to sort out the problems with a spanner: Christine felt that she was becoming more of a software engineer than a car mechanic.
And now there was this scandal with the so-called ‘defeat devices’. Christine wondered whether it was time to call it a day and close the garage. Or perhaps she should change the emphasis of Bob’s Garage and only repair classic cars with simpler mechanical engines and not a microchip in sight, but they were becoming scarcer by the day.
“Cars have become nothing more than computers on wheels,” she muttered to herself for the thousand and oneth time.
