Another SPOTD report, although this one was not too bad in the end. I was driving down our street going home from the Uni campus and I noticed there was an old bloke (about 70yo) standing beside his car unhappily, with the bonnet up. Seeing it is Senior Citizens Week, I figured I’d do a good deed and pull over to offer assistance, since I was in no hurry, and he was dressed in a full suit and might have been struggling to do something simple without getting filthy dirty.

I parked the car and walked across the street to see if I could help, and I could tell from the pool of water forming under the car it had just overheated. He was trying to undo the cap to fill it up with water and was struggling. He looked up at me as I approached and gave one of those half-smiles you give when you greet someone at the same time as your car has overheated. He straightened up and asked if I could remove the radiator cap for him so he could fill it up, because he was afraid of getting scalded.

I could hear the water still boiling inside the radiator, so I decided to just loosen the cap the recommended quarter-turn to let the pressure dissipate. As soon as I reached for the radiator cap, he stepped forward in alarm and said “no, no, not that cap, it’s the other one”. I looked again, and knew I was taking the cap off the radiator, so I looked to see which cap he meant. He was pointing at the oil cap, which is the one I thought he was undoing as I walked up, but when he straightened up, he’d taken his hand off it and so I couldn’t tell for sure.

I corrected him and showed him the logo of the oil can on top of the oil cap, and how the radiator cap was the one I was undoing, but he was rather dubious about it for a couple of minutes. I had to get him to listen to the noise where the water was boiling, so that he would agree with me that the radiator cap was indeed the one that needed to be removed.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that he had been trying for about 10 minutes to get the oil cap off to fill it with water but had not succeeded since he did not have the strength in his hands to do so. I had rather fortunately (for him) decided to stop and offer a hand or else he would have eventually gotten the oil cap off and filled his sump with water.

So how does this fellow get SPOTD? Well, for those that know me, I know pretty much nothing about how to fix a car, and had only really stopped on the basis that he was of an age unlikely to own a mobile phone to call for professional assistance, or maybe offer him a cup of tea or coffee while he was waiting since it was only a couple of hundred metres from our front door. I never really was in a position to help if it was anything too complicated, even something relatively simple like a fan belt problem.

And yet I knew more about the internal workings of the car than him, so he had to get the SPOTD award.

Categories: SPOTD