Why Does Walmart Hate My Car?

I have been having a lousy automotive time for the past few days thanks to Walmart.  And the kicker is, it is not the first dent in my soul put there by the Walmart corporate boot.  They are out to get me.  Specifically me.  Well, maybe paranoia and depression from chronic illness are not only good friends, but cousins.  But it does seem that Walmart is trying to destroy me.

Episode One : Evil Decorative Parking-Lot Rocks

About five years ago I had a run-in with one of the corporation’s most seemingly innocuous assassins, namely a decorative parking-lot rock.

Look carefully at the expression on this rock’s face. Do you see the vicious smirk? No? Then he has you precisely where he wants you.

A more insidious lurking evil I have never encountered.  Why is it even there?  Does it make the parking lot more beautiful?  Does it make you want to buy hand lotion, bananas, and school supplies from Walmart?  Does it make you want to buy car tires?  It may make you need to buy car tires.  But this particular decorative rock nearly destroyed my car.  You see, Walmart parking lot drivers are some of the best drivers in Texas.  You can tell by the kill stickers on their driver’s doors.  The one that was coming for me that late October afternoon was an Ace.  I swear, I’m sure I saw a little stick man, a stick woman, three stick kids, and five stick cats on her car.  It only takes five kills to officially become an Ace.  She even had one of those stickers in her back window of cartoon Calvin peeing on a Ford logo… and my cars are all Fords.  I was trying to turn out of the adjacent parking area in front of her.  She was at least thirty yards away and going at a snail’s pace when I turned in front of her.  Suddenly she floored the thing and was zooming straight for the driver’s door.  I swerved up onto the curb to avoid a grinding death of shattered glass and broken metal (or possibly plastic… it is an American car after all).  And guess who was waiting for my car at that precise spot.  The front passenger-side tire went up over the rock and the car came down hard on top of it, impaling itself, making a huge dent in the floor of the car right underneath number one son’s passenger seat.  We were stuck there.  The car still ran at that point, but there was no way to get the car off the rock.  The Ace driver sped off down Marsh Lane satisfied with the kill.

So I called Triple A to get a tow truck to come and lift the poor impaled car off the rock.  The rock would not let go.  A passing guy who had been previously t-boned on that corner stopped to help my son and I get the car off the rock.  No matter how we all pushed or pulled, forward or reverse, the car was not going anywhere.  So I called the tow truck, thinking surely it could lift the car off the rock and I could still drive away from this.  But then we were blessed with the help of a family of portly Mexicans (honestly, the license plate on their car was from Mexico, and they spoke only Castillian Spanish from the central part of that country, so I am not being racist here.)  The jolly little man told me in Spanish that I could only partly understand that he had tow cables in his car and could pull me off the rock.  I tried to tell him in Pidgeon Spanish (yes, my Spanish is apparently for the birds) that, “no, no… I want to wait for the tow truck I called.”  Apparently my no, gracias meant something like “yes, please, and make it snappy,” in his version of Spanish.  So, the guy who took pity on us because he had also been a victim at that spot, and the happy Mexican guy hooked the back axle of my car up to the back bumper of his little Mexican car and then he had me put the car in reverse and try to drive backwards while he tugged away with his little chugger of a car that contained his plump little wife and three plump and excessively happy little kids.  He assured me in Spanish that he would rescue my car.  So… we got the car off the rock.  But we left a chunk of the oil pan from the bottom of the engine on the tallest of the three knobs on the top of that evil, evil rock.  There was a long trail of oozing black car blood on the rock and on the parking lot.  I could envision Walmart handing me a bill for cleaning up the mess in their parking lot and on their evil rock.

The happy smile on the face of the Mexican guy disappeared.  He quickly retrieved his tow cable and they chugged happlily off down Marsh Lane too.  The man who first tried to help us helped us move the now fatally wounded car in neutral over to an unused parking space to wait for the tow truck.  Of course, by the time he got there, the garage where I wanted to take the car was closed, so we had to hitch a ride home, and we arranged for the car-corpse to be towed in the morning.  The evil decorative rock had won.  There was now a gaping hole in my car, and an even bigger hole in my heart.  One would think that fate and evil corporations would be satisfied with such an outcome.  But no, there is more to come in Episode Two, which I will have to tell you about tomorrow.