Car Guy Identification Test

You walk to a car and notice that some trim is hanging crooked. You...

A.    Straighten it.
B.    Ignore it.
C.    Strip the car to its frame and spend the next six months designing custom trim while often stating aloud your belief that the inventor of the pop rivet was a total moron.

The correct answer is 'C' but partial credit can be given to anybody who simply blames the whole stupid thing on "marketing" and those cheap car manufacturer accountant bean-counters.
 

Social Skills

Car Guys have different objectives than normal people when it comes to social interaction.  Normal peopple expect to accomplish several unrealistic things from social interaction:

• stimulating and thought-provoking conversation
• important social contacts
• a feeling of connectedness with other individuals

• get it over with as soon as possible
• find other car guys and talk cars
• avoid getting invited to something unpleasant (ie. an event not about cars)
• demonstrate mental superiority and mastery of all automotive subjects

To the Car Guy, all cars in the world can be placed into one of two categories:

• cars that need to be fixed
• cars that will need to be fixed after they've had a few minutes to play with them

No Car Guy looks at a TV remote without wondering what it would take to turn it into a timing light, remote starter or to just steal the buttons for the dash.

No Car Guy can take a shower without wondering if some sort of wax coating would make showering unnecessary, or think "I should be washing my car instead."

To the Car Guy, the world is a toybox full of sub-optimized and feature-poor cars.

Fashion and Appearance

Clothes are the lowest priority for a Car Guy, assuming the basic needs for temperature and decency have been satisfied.  Unless it is a promo t-shirt, club jacket or triple layer nomex race suit, all else is a waste.  Note that European Car - Car Guys have higher standards than their domestic and Japanese car driving counterparts.

Dating and Social Life

Dating is never easy for Car Guys.  A normal person will employ various indirect and duplicitous methods to create a false impression of attractiveness.

Car Guys use primer, chrome, spinning tires and/or loud exhaust systems.

Fortunately, Car Guys have an ace in the hole: they are widely recognized as superior marriage material.  True Car Guys are intelligent, dependable, employed, honest, handy around the house and too poor to fool around (because all of their money and time are spent on their cars).

Car Guys reach their peak of sexual attractiveness later than normal men, becoming irresistable erotic dynamos in their mid-thirties to late-forties, when the car has paint, and not just primer - at least this is what they tell themselves.

Honesty

Car Guys are always honest in matters of looks and human relationships.  That is why it is a good idea to keep Car Guys away from customers, romantic interests and other people who cannot handle the truth.

Car Guys sometimes bend the truth to avoid work.  They say things that sound like likes but are technically not lies, because nobody could be expected to believe them.

The complete list of Car Guy 'lies' is listed below:

• "I won't change anything without asking you first"
• "I'll return your [hard-to-find] tool tomorrow"
• "I have to have new tools to finish the job on the car"
• "I'm not jealous of your car"
• "It's stock"

Car Guys are notoriously frugal.  This is not because of cheapness or mean spiritedness, it is simply because every spending situation is a problem in optimisation.  Car Guys rationalize spending situations as such: "How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash to spend on my car."

The rationalisation is modified when the situation involves a car: "How can I NOT rebuild it, it's in the garage anyway."

Powers of Concentration

If there is one trait that best defines the Car Guy, it is the ability to concentrate on one subject to the complete exclusion of everything else in the environment.  This sometimes causes Car Guys to be pronounced dead prematurely.  Some funeral homes have started checking garages before processing bodies.  When a garage is found with a primered car, wall of tools, a lift as well as numerous posters and calendars of half-naked (nekkid) women posing in race suits, with race cars or drums of oil and/or race fuel, the body of the 'dead' Car Guy is propped up in the lounge while a recording of the banshee wail of a Ferrari V12 or last year's Monaco Grand Prix are played in the background, in the hope that he will just 'snap out of it'.

Risk

Car Guys love risk.  They try to multiply it whenever they can.  This is understandable, given that when a Car Guys makes one little mistake, it is time to rebuild, restore or modify.

The risk/reward calculation for Car Guys looks something like this:
RISK: Public humiliation and/or death in a race car.
REWARD: Plastic trophy worth $4.00.

Being practical people, Car Guys evaluate this balance of risk and reward and sometimes decide that risk is not a good thing.  The best way to avoid risk is by having a set of excuses.

The complete list of Car Guys excuses is listed below:

• "The sunsabitches shipped me the wrong part!"
• "Traction"
• "Track conditions"
• "They cheated!"
• "Needs tuning"
• "Missed a shift"
• "I need a [new or special] tool"
• "I got a tank of bad gas"

Ego-wise, there are two things that are important to Car Guys: how fast they are and how many cars they own.

The fastest way to get a Car Guy to fix a car is to offer to drop it at the dealership for repair.

No Car Guy can walk away from a project car until it is done, or a "good deal" on another car is found.  no illness or distraction is sufficient to get the Car Guy out of the garage.

Challenges of modifying/repairing/restoring quickly become personal.  They become a battle between the tools available and the laws of nature.

Car Guys will go without food and hygene for days just to install a "new" part (other times, just because they forgot to eat or bathe).  Indeed, Car Guys have been known to survive for months on diets of macaroni and cheese, just to save enough to purchase a new exhaust system.  In Asia, the Car Guys substitute the mac and cheese for boxes and boxes of instant noodles.

When Car Guys finally get to test drive the new part, they experience an ego rush that is better than sex, including the kind of sex where females AND cars are involved.

Nothing is more threatening to a Car Guy than the suggestion that somebody has more tools or cars.  Normal people sometimes use this knowledge as a lever to extract free work from the Car Guy.

When a Car Guy says that something cannot be done (a code phrase that means "it's not fun to do"), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the Car Guy with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these lines: "That's okay, I'll take it to a repair shop.  They'll know how to fix difficult problems."

At that point, it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the Car Guy and the problem.  The Car Guy will set upon the problem like a starved chihuahua on a pork chop.