COLUMN: Just Tell Me How Much I Owe

By Tobin Barnes
And the hits just keep on happening!

Remember that phrase you’d hear on Top-40 radio stations? Well, there’s “hits” other than top-selling songs.

Like the hits we’ve been taking from the mice or mouse in our garage.

Last time I told you about the mouse in our car. He was a fiend who had somehow climbed in up under the hood. Yeah, a mouse who’d maintained a storage bin in an air filter. And how we’d evidently executed him with the ventilation fan--thunk, thunk, thunk.

Of course, we didn’t know that’s what we’d done until the next day when we smelled the result. Holy moly!

Took the car down to the mechanic. He discovered not only a dead mouse, but also an air filter packed with provisions for a long stay--namely, a goodly larder made up of our dog’s Kibbles and Chunks.

Well, I cursed our luck to be plagued with such an ingenious mouse, forked over about a hundred bucks to the mechanic, and wondered what the Universe had planned for us next.

We didn’t have long to wait.

I get a call from my wife who’s out running errands (same scenario we were in when the sinister mouse got thunked). Except this time my wife was driving our pickup, not the car that had been earlier victimized.

“It won’t accelerate when I push down on the gas,” she reported.

Oh great. What now?

“I’m going to stop by and make an appointment.”

As we waited to take it in, it occurred to us that the mouse or mice might have fouled up the pickup, also.

Could it be?

Could lightening strike twice in the same garage?

You darned betcha!

The mechanic found it fairly amusing that Kibbles and Chunks had been stored in our pickup as well as our car.

“Yeah, when we were looking in there,” the mechanic said, “the dog food was kinda moving around.”

“Really?” I said. (My gullibility knows no bounds.)

“No. I’m just kidding you.” Har!

But packed with dog food it was, just like the car. The dog food was restricting the air intake, killing acceleration.

Anyway, ka-ching! Another hundred bucks down the drain.

And while the mechanic was in there under the hood, he found a nasty bunch of other things that needed to be done to our fourteen-year old pickup--not mouse related, just age related.

Okay.

We knew the pickup probably needed some work, so we’re coughing up some more dough on that stuff.

But there’s some questions still left unanswered:

Will other mice be attacking our vehicles even though the first mouse literally bit the fan? Maybe making revenge sorties?

Is there a professor mouse out there in the garage or yard teaching student mice about Kibbles and Chunks and the benefits of automotive storage? Or was there only one dementedly evil mouse?

And finally, when’s the other shoe going to drop? And how many shoes are out there?