I was talking to a friend the other day and she was explaining to me that her longtime car is on its last legs (wheels, actually) and she has reluctantly decided it’s time to purchase a new one.
“I hate buying a new car,” she said, “because it’s always such a waste of good money, not to mention that you have to spend hours and hours haggling with less-than-candid car salesmen. And I can’t believe how much the taxes on a new car are nowadays. That alone adds a couple of thousand dollars to the already ridiculous price tag. But it has to be done.”
“Why don’t you just get yourself a nice used car?” I suggested.
“Well,” she explained, “I’m not very mechanical so I want a car that is really reliable and has a great warranty, so every decade or so I just bite the bullet and go get myself a new one.”
“So, have you given much thought to what kind of car you want?” I asked.
“No, not really,” she admitted. “As long as it’s white or silver, I pretty much don’t care.”
“You mean the color of the new car is your most important consideration?”
“Of course,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Why is that?” I asked with interest.
“Because where I live, I’m surrounded by big, beautiful trees that are always filled with all kinds of wonderful birds, but they of course poop like crazy, and it’s a well-known fact that birds are much less likely to poop on a white or silver car.”
“Is that right?” I asked, trying hard not to smile. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes,” she explained. “They did a big study on it years ago at a really prestigious university in England, and they found that birds much prefer to poop on brightly colored cars, especially red ones. You didn’t know that?”
“I’m afraid not,” I admitted.
“Well, it’s definitely true, and if you’ve got a red or black car, birds will actually go out of their way to poop on it. And I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing I hate more in this whole world than cleaning bird poop off of my car!”
As our little conversation continued, I learned that my friend had all kinds of other interesting thoughts when it came to cars. For instance, she never washes hers.
“You’re kidding?” I said when she told me that.
“That’s what rain is for Daryl. But I do make an effort to clean out the inside of my car a couple of times a year. Other than that, and making sure I take it to Jiffy Lube every 5,000 miles or so for an oil change, I just treat my car as it should be treated, as a man-made machine to get me safely from place to place. And I have never understood why you men can’t see cars in that same simple light.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, like I said, for a woman, a car is only a means for getting from point A to point B. It’s a machine, like a washer or lawn mower, nothing more. We are not fanatical about keeping them clean and polished and have absolutely no interest whatsoever in what goes on under the bonnet, as long as it doesn’t make strange or scary noises under there. You men, on the other hand, seem to be absolutely obsessed with your cars and trucks. And it also seems like the bigger and more powerful they are, the more you like them. Maybe it has something to do with making up for inadequacies in other areas? Now don’t get me wrong, women can get a little silly about their cars, too, and I’ve known a few who have turned the inside of their cars into an exact replica of their bedroom when they were nine years old, complete with little stuffed toy animals, paper flowers, silly notices stuck to their bumpers, and perfumed smelly things hanging from their rearview mirror. But when it comes to truly pathological behavior about cars, men are the winners hands-down!”
Later that evening, I fired up a computer search engine and sure enough, there actually is an English university (Leicester) that did a study on the subject. It turns out that in England bird droppings cost motorists more than 57 million pounds annually in damage and repairs, with more than 89 percent of drivers reporting frequent “bird strikes.” Most of the problem apparently happens when car owners try to clean the “gritty bird muck” off and end up causing permanent damage to their paint job. Pigeons and sea gulls seem to be the main culprits, and as the study pointed out, they do not carry car insurance. Anyway, it turns out that the study actually identified green as the car color least lightly to have a bird poop on it, which I of course quickly reported to my new-car-buying friend.
“Well,” she said upon hearing the news, “I simply can’t stand the color green, so no way am I buying a green car! You know, with cars being so expensive nowadays, maybe I’ll just get myself a good new bicycle and start riding it to work.”
“Just don’t get a red one,” I suggested.