I was speaking to a service advisor at a well-known local car dealership regarding an annoying problem with my truck. Different from problems that are not annoying, such as those of routine maintenance and repair of wear parts, this one had shown up a week before as a glitch in the “Driver Information Center.” That’s a nonessential display of all the stuff going on in your vehicle that is of no interest to normal people. I suppose there are a few drivers out there who require constant monitoring of the temperature of their transmission fluid, the exact air pressure in their left rear tire, the life left in their engine oil and how the instant mpg calculation changes when driving up Mount Washington. Then up again with your studded snows. And Lord knows there are plenty of hybrid car drivers playing the “My Mpg Is Greater Than Yours” game featuring the rage-inducing technique of accelerator avoidance. Oh, wait; sorry, that’s another column.
While having all that information at my fingertips is not something I require, the fact that a factory-installed system in my vehicle is inoperable makes me want to get it fixed. It’s not that I use it; it’s that something I paid for in my truck is broken. Off to the dealer I went.
Case one: I purchased my truck nearly new four years ago via the interwebs from a dealer in Georgia. (Buy used, buy Southern, fly down, drive it home, undercoat it.) It has not required a visit to a dealer since I purchased it and I reasoned that it was not in this dealership’s database. The nice service advisor asked a series of questions having nothing to do with the truck and everything to do with me — name, address, phone number, favorite women’s professional basketball team — and then, looking at her computer screen, she asked, “2017 Chevy Colorado?”
Clearly, I was wrong about the information in the dealership’s database.
Because I can be a jerk, I replied, “Oh, you don’t have my Tahoe in there?”
She looked up with a surprised expression and said, “You still have that??”
With my not having been there for service for any of my vehicles since the 1980s, they are able to connect me to two trucks, one of which I sold nearly five years ago. Now, I’m not saying that the business of collecting my personal data is starting to make me uncomfortable. No, that discomfort started many years ago. But it now seems that any right to privacy went out the express-down power window with ad-free cable TV and eight-track tapes.
Case two: I am prescribed a medication that is normally readily available at my pharmacy of choice. Recently it has been out of stock, with uncertain dates for availability. It’s a daily maintenance drug for me, so it has been up to me to call other pharmacies in the area searching for one that has this medication in stock. Last month I located some at a drugstore in another town. I called them and was told they had this medication in stock at the time, but their inventory is sold on a first-come, first-served basis.
A quick call to my doctor’s office through their amazing electronic swamp of apathy and denial got me a recorded promise to reach out to me within 48 hours unless today is Wednesday afternoon through Friday, in which case I should call back on Monday, send a message through the portal, call 911, or rub some dirt on it.
Thus, I was in the garden when my back pocket began to vibrate. The out-of-town pharmacy had been sent the prescription. Thinking that a dirty, ill-tempered curmudgeon hanging around the drugstore pickup counter might be bad for business, I decided to show up there and wait to kind of hurry the process along. I was right, and in short order my name was called.
Her name tag read, “Pharmacist.” I had never been in that drugstore before and had never used this particular chain to fill a prescription. Nevertheless, Ms. Pharmacist had a complete and current list of my meds and gave me an unnecessarily loud scolding about one of the med combinations on the list being notoriously unwise and I should tell my doctor to consider other treatment options. I explained that my trusted family shaman was the one with 25-plus years of study in this area, whereas I had spent the same 25 years burning gunpowder and studying various forms of illicit relationships and their surprising connections to street tacos. I am not going to tell him his business. The take-away here is that a business with which I had never done business knew all my … uh … business.
If there’s a point to all this, it’s just that I mind my own business and I think the world would be a far better place if it did the same.
Butch Lawson is an observer of life. He lives on Bailey Island.
