Back when I was living in my last apartment I had a Ford Ranger truck. She was red, the smallest truck Ford made, and she got me reliably from point A to point B. I called her Roxanne.
Like everything you use outdoors in Texas, Roxane would get dirty from time to time, requiring a good washing to get her clean.
Since I was working in a retail bookstore at the time, and retail bookstores are notorious for not paying their workers anything more than enough to just survive, taking her to a car wash was out of the question. Sure, many gas stations had a ‘car wash’ attached to them, that gave a very basic sudsing / rinse / air dry, but it wasn’t as good as you could do yourself and it cost money.
Side note – if you do go through an automated car wash like that, roll down the windows when you get to the air blower part. The experience is quite exhilarating. Don’t do it if you have a lot of papers or other loose items in the car you don’t want flying out the windows, but otherwise, go for it. You’ll have a blast (no pun intended).
Now, living in an apartment complex, you have to put up with certain things. Like rules. One of which was ‘don’t wash your vehicle in the parking lots’. Not that you really could anyway, at least not without effort, because they had no way to hook up a hose to a water faucet to be able to spray your vehicle with water. I suppose you could get a bucket, fill it up in your apartment, run outside, throw it on your vehicle … wash, rinse, repeat. That’s a lot more effort than I wanted to put into cleaning my vehicle, especially as I lied on the second floor. It would also take a lot more time, and have more of a chance that the apartment manager would catch you, or one of your neighbors would narc on you.
I took an alternate approach to washing Roxanne. I had a Super Soaker at the time. For those unfamiliar with them, think of a water pistol. On steroids. It had a tank you filled with water and attached to the gun. Then you would pump the gun a few times to build up air pressure. When you pulled the trigger, you got a good stream of water, which was very useful for water fights.
It turns out, it is also useful for washing your truck. I could get enough water in the tank to hose down one side of Roxane, get her sudsy, then be able to rinse most of the soap off. I’d have to refill the water tank maybe three times, four if I was doing an extra thorough job and trying to wash the soap down the gutter to the drain. (Always dispose of the evidence.)
Sometimes it takes a little sideways thinking to solve a problem.
Do you have any current problems that could be solved with a little sideways thinking, my Hordeling?
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum