Gearheads, we have been called. While “normal” folks get out their iPhones and whip out their maxed out credit cards when something breaks, to us mechanical maladies are just more challenges to be enjoyed and mastered. And to us, it’s amazing how some of the “normal” folks survive… Let me tell you a very true story.

I’m on a Facebook group of folks that live in my old ‘hood in north Minneapolis. Other day one  of them gets on in a panic, looking for someone with a pickup truck. Turns out the parents of her yet to open charter school have decided that it’s a high priority to landscape the place. She’s looking for someone too haul wood chips, and she doesn’t even really know how much she needs.

Now a gearhead’s response to this queery would be “how much wood chips, and from where to where?”. Common sense dictating that a pickup load would be more than enough and that the pickup and drop sites ain’t even a mile apart,  a gearhead would hop in the pickup or hook up the trailer, head over to the wood chip pile, load up, drive to the school, unload, and head home. Total time, about an hour, and a six pack would easily cover the gas expenses.

But not for a bunch of helpless Yuppies… After a day or so they determined that none of them had a pickup and they hadn’t even the common sense to fold the back seats down in their Prius, throw down a tarp, and get on with it. So  instead of spending less than a buck for gas to haul the free wood chips from the city’s pile the less than mile to the school, they paid a tree service a few hundred bucks for a dump truck load of wood chips. And they didn’t even ask if it was a single or tandem axle dump truck!

No wonder these helpless Yuppies are perpetually broke, overdrawn, and maxed out on credit… Again, they’re helpless. A Check Engine Light appears on their BMW Mini’s dashboard, and they have to have it flatbedded 150 miles home to the nearest dealer… Fortunately this gearhead diagnosed the problem as simple overheating due to poor design, dowsed the fat little car’s engine with water kept ready for cooling the two decade old BMW airhead, and the Yuppies were on there way to their next crisis.

So be thankful you were born with the gearhead gene!