There was a time when I kind of enjoyed working on cars. I was young and single, and having a car sitting in the driveway for a couple of weeks wasn't a great inconvenience -- I'd just ride my motorcycle. Things are a little different now, and enjoyment is not the word that comes to mind when an automotive opportunity arises. Now having a trustworthy and capable mechanic helps make life easier to bear.

For a number of years I had been taking our vehicles to the shop down on the corner. They had been doing reliable work for reasonable rates, and it was easy to drop off the car and walk home, and then walk back and pick it up. Whenever I needed some work done, I knew where I was going to go. One day, however, things changed. I don't remember the details, but I needed about $500 worth of work done on the van. So I took it down to the corner. I'm not sure whether the shop's ownership had changed, but the guy who looked at the van gave me a $1000 estimate of work that needed to be done. I looked at his estimate, told him I didn't have $1000, and would he please do the work I had requested, which, according to his estimate, amounted to about $500. He tried to convince me that I really needed the extra work done. I knew better and again declined the offer. He shrugged and agreed to do what I had asked.

I understand that businesses exist to make money, but I was a steady customer requesting reasonable service, and being hit up for unnecessary repairs to increase their revenue at my expense really irritated me. After that job, I never went back there again.

So of course, a couple of weeks later, my wife, Mary, tells me that when she went to fill up the gas tank, gasoline spilled onto the ground. This did not seem like a good thing. So I crawled under the van and noticed a cracked rubber hose at a junction where the pipe from the gasoline fillup hole (technical term) connected to the pipe into the gas tank. While not easily accessible, the fix didn't seem that difficult: about 8 inches of rubber hose and a couple of hose clamps. Since my mechanic was a jerk, I decided to just fix it myself.

Things aren't always what they seem. When I went to the auto supply store to get a new piece of rubber hose, I learned that that particular section of hose was specially treated (read: expensive) to be impervious to gasoline. And they didn't sell it by the inch -- the shortest piece they had was 3 feet long (and expensive). But I needed it, so I bought it (if anybody needs a piece, I still have 2+ feet in the garage).

Removing the old hose was a piece of cake. Loosen the hose clamps, slide them off, a little razor-blade knife action and that's done. I used the old hose to measure a new section from my 3-foot-long, gasoline-impervious (expensive) piece of hose. A little more razor-blade knife action and I'm ready to install...

Well. Conceptually the process was simple: slide the hose onto the pipe, position it correctly, position and tighten the hose clamps, done. Remember that "not easily accessible" from above?

The space between the two sections of metal pipe (the one leading from the fillup hole and the one leading to the gas tank) was about 3 inches. Neither section moved very much -- the gas tank was secured with various metal straps to the underside of the van; the fillup pipe was secured to the body and held in place by a piece of metal also attached to the bottom of the van. If I had been in a garage on a lift, the simple thing may have been to loosen the straps holding the gas tank to allow easy insertion of the rubber hose. But I was on the ground in my driveway, and the idea of messing with a 30-gallon tank of gasoline didn't appeal to me.

So the next best option seemed to be to slide one end of the hose over one section of metal pipe until the other end of the hose would fit inside the opening, and then slide the hose back over the other section of metal pipe. There seemed to be enough room to slide the hose onto the pipe without running into the metal support strap, so off I went.

Things went according to plan for the first few minutes. The hose slid reasonably well over the metal pipe. This was a good idea; I'll be done in a few minutes.

But the closer I got, the more difficult the task became. As more hose had to move its way up the pipe, the less simple the task became. Not only was more effort required for increasingly smaller advances, but I was getting tired, the day was fading and darkness was oozing in, and the lack of room to maneuver was hampering the application of the required extra muscle.

I was getting frustrated and wanted to quit, but I could see that I was getting close, and having gone this far, quitting left me with a van that was undriveable. Yet struggle as I might, it seemed as if that last quarter of an inch was just going to remain unattainable. In desperation and disgust, I looked up to heaven and yelled at God, "Is a quarter of an inch too much to ask?!"

Pop. The hose slips onto the pipe. In five minutes I'm all done.

I crawled out from under the van and looked sheepishly to the heavens where the stars were just starting to glimmer in the night sky: "You didn't ask."