A recent conversation with an employee of the local car wash alerted me to the need to educate customers as to the proper behavior for car wash patrons. Detailers often frequent or operate car washes but I suspect the ill-mannered people I heard about were ordinary customers and not us.
First off, Gentlemen , even though the Do It Yourself bays have running water and floor drains, they should not be mistaken for rest rooms. Public urination is a crime and an even worse one when I have to smell "Eau de Bum" the whole time I wash a car. They say, " We all gotta go sometime ", but women seem to control their bladders so maybe men can too.
Secondly : Ladies, proper dress is an essential part of car wash etiquette. If your " Daisy Duke " blue jean shorts have worn through in the seat or have a large tear up the side, it may be time to go shopping for another pair. Otherwise, you may get unsolicited offers of help vacuuming your car from male customers. Special fashion tip : If you have to tug at your pants every few seconds to keep them up, you need a belt or new pants.
Thirdly, someone's forgotten floor mat left hanging on the clamp is not your property. Leave it there. He may come back for it. Even if you drive a pick-up truck and need things to fill up the cargo bed, don't take things that don't belong to you such as the grates in the floor drains, even though they can be made into charcoal grills. Don't steal the tip jar ; that money is legally the property of the guys who work in the tunnel wash. Remember the Golden Rule.
It is considered bad taste to voice complaints about having to pay $6 for a tunnel wash. Be cheerful even when forking over all of that money.
Make sure you remember all of your belongings when you leave. You'd be surprised how many hunters, after spending hours to bag a deer, forget and drive off from the car wash leaving the deer carcass behind-and they never remember to come back to retrieve it ! Curious.
Another problem is people who mistake the coin machines as gambling devices and try to win jackpots by tampering with the device so it drops a lot of quarters without any bills being inserted. This is not Vegas and if you do this it makes it harder on the next guy who needs quarters and finds they are all gone. Honesty is the best policy.
Not everyone shares your taste in Rap Music and wants you to play your $4,000 stereo at full blast. Save the music for your neighbors back at home, please. And if the attendant asks you to turn it off, stick to normally-used four letter words when you cuss him out.
Lastly, we know how much you like to go mud dogging or four-wheelin' and tear up the ecosystem and that's fine but try not to take your encrusted truck and gravel-filled bed through the tunnel wash because all of that crud gets picked up by the wash toweling and dragged over the car behind you, producing a thing we professional detailers refer to as "scratches".
Now that you know how to act at the local car wash, you too can be the life of the party every Saturday morning.
Hope you enjoyed that ! - Doug
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/2007 05:11AM by Doug Delmont.