How to Impress Your Wife with Car Talk

From: John Steffee

I once lived in an area where we could listen to Car Talk on WITF in Hershey or another NPR station from Wilkes Barre. One Saturday morning, I realized that the callers all sounded familiar. It soon became obvious that I was listening to the Wilkes Barre station's replay of the prior week's program from WITF in Hershey. This presented a fantastic opportunity.

My wife (at that time), constantly complained that I couldn't do anything mechanical. I'm a CPA for Pete's sake, what made her believe I was mechanical in any way, shape or form? Anyhow, I wrote down the problem and your solution to all the callers' concerns from the next week's WITF program and studied the list endlessly for the entire week.

Then, I made sure we were in the car together at 10 AM the Saturday after that. I casually tuned into the Car Talk broadcast from Wilkes Barre. She rolled her eyes and gave me that exasperated look that she got every time I walked through the house with a power tool.

I nailed the first question, telling my wife it sounded like the caller needed new ball joints. She told me I just got lucky. I then properly diagnosed a new starter, transmission slippage and every other problem for the rest of the show. She immediately began to give me a renewed amount of respect.

She ended up divorcing me a few years later anyhow, but I wanted to thank you guys for giving me, most likely, another three or four years with her before she came to the conclusion I was a complete loser and left me for an unemployed former bait shop owner with a significant family trust fund.

John Steffee