Among the three of you who actually read the posts here rather than just hitting “Mark all as Read” in your aggregators might recall that my beautiful little car was recently smashed into by a big, bad taxi driver who was conducting himself in his affairs with extreme, nay, criminal negligence.

I recently learned that, in spite of my two strong witnesses and very realistic, credible story, he’s telling his insurance company that the whole thing was my fault, and that he was making room for me because he thought I wanted to change lanes (how he was making room by running into my car is a bit of a mystery, but whatever).

It just frustrates the hell out of me that he’s doing this. There’s no real question – the insurance companies are agreeing that he’s, like, guilty with a capital “UILTY” (don’t you ever get tired of capitalizing the first letter – why not the rest of the word – the bloody tyranny of it all). What he’s doing, then, is just slowing down the whole process, costing everyone else involved time, and therefore money. I wish I could call him just to say “Hey – stop being a dickhead, you sore loser car-crashing bastard.”

Gets better, though.

I gave a couple short talks at the ITEC event in Seattle yesterday. Since that’s up around where my car was being repaired, I stopped in to pick the sucker up.

I was so excited. I’ve heard stories about estranged siblings, living out most of their lives without any contact with each other, until one day, while eating a ham sandwich and watching Unsolved Mysteries, they see someone with whom they feel an “immediate and inexplicable connection,” obviously because they’re all related and psychically linked or something. Then one of the other siblings, who’s also eating a ham sandwich, chokes on it and asphyxiates on the pig meat. The other siblings, through their psychic links, immediately Sense the passing and Know that it’s time to meet at a location in Wyoming called Devil’s Tower where…

Um…

I’m sorry. Don’t know what in the hell I was talking about there.

To get back to the point, I was really excited to see my car.

The Car Person drove it out of the garage and parked it in front of me. I was delighted. They had washed it, vacuumed it, and repaired all the damage done by Evil Cabbie.

Then I noticed a problem.

“So…” I began, “when the car was new, I recall the bumper lining up properly with the hood. Why isn’t it doing that now?”

The Car Person smiled and, after inspecting the damage, explained that “…all Mini’s are like that. None of them line up properly. It’s so strange. None of the Mini’s we’ve ever worked on have lined up. I guess they just come from the factory like that.”

Surely, this man was joking.

“No… No, I remember clearly that the bumper lined up properly. The wheel well looked like one continuous piece, and not like three mismatched parts from different cars strapped onto one. This is very different than it was before.”

But he wasn’t joking.

“Weeeell, I don’t know what to tell you. This is how Mini’s are. Take a look here…”

He got on his knees and pointed to a Thingy.

“That there is your three-quarter inch chrome-reverse muffler bearing. If you see how it fits into the pressure shim just there, you’ll see how it could never rotate up so that the fender torque-flap fits into its slot nice and neat. So, it’s impossible that your bumper ever lined up with the hood.”

I was having a hard time believing this - that a team of designers and engineers working on the car knew that the different body parts didn’t quite line up, and that it was good enough to be released. I mean, this is a car – not software.

I whipped out the Audiovox SMT 5600 and googled straightaway for “2003 Mini Cooper”. Within seconds, I was showing Car Person image after image of Mini’s that were built properly, with bumpers lining up with hoods and everything.

He complained that the images were too small and that we couldn’t really see whether things were lining up. That’s a load of crap, but I wanted him to be happy, so I switched to the laptop.

Did a search for WiFi networks and, like a minor miracle, found one. It was the shop’s. It was unsecured. It was perfect. DHCP was turned off, but guessing that they had left the router set to its defaults, only stopping along the way to require static IP’s, I gave myself a 192.168.1.x address, plugged in my own values for DNS, set the gateway to 192.168.1.1, and was up and running immediately.

Bloody amateurs.

And that’s what did it. Three minutes later, I had all the evidence I needed, and my car was back on the lift. Turns out that their repair people didn’t properly tighten some screw or something along the way, and that the Car Person was lying his sweet, juicy little buttocks off.

Ten years ago, I probably would have left the shop with little recourse. Car Person would have refused to do the work, and I would have driven home with my poorly reassembled vehicle.

The lesson here is obvious, of course:

Don’t fuck with nerds.