The Motoring Desk examines the unsolicited vehicle assessment, why it is always accurate and what to do with the information once you have received it
By our Motoring Correspondent, Kobus Liebenberg
I want to be precise about what happened.
I pulled into the Engen on Andries Pretorius Street on a Tuesday afternoon for fuel. Forty litres of 95 unleaded. That was the transaction I had come to conduct. It was a defined, bounded transaction with clear parameters and no ambiguity about scope.
I did not ask for anything else.
The attendant — a man named Sipho who has been working at this particular Engen for at least six years and who knows my car better than I do, a fact I was about to be reminded of — filled the tank, replaced the cap and then paused. He walked, slowly and with great deliberateness, around the front of the vehicle to the passenger side. He crouched. He looked at the front left tyre. He stood up. He walked to the rear. He looked at that tyre. He stood up again and came back to my window.
“Front left is low,” he said. “Rear right also. You should check them.”
He said this without drama, without judgment in his voice, but with an expression that communicated everything his voice was too professional to say, which was: I cannot believe you drove here on these tyres and I want you to understand that I noticed.
I said thank you. I drove to the air pump. The front left was at 26 PSI. The rear right was at 24. The recommended pressure, as stated on the sticker inside the driver’s door that I have read once in four years, is 32.
Sipho was right. Sipho is always right.
THE PHENOMENON
Every regular petrol station user in Somerset West knows a version of this experience. The attendant who notices the oil before you do. The one who spots the crack in the windscreen wiper while cleaning your windscreen, holds it up briefly for your inspection and replaces it without comment. The one who observes, from a standing position beside a moving vehicle, that your brake light on the left side is out.
How they know these things is not fully understood. They are not looking for these problems. They are doing their job — filling tanks, cleaning glass, checking oil when asked — and the information simply presents itself to them because they are paying attention in a way that the owner of the vehicle, who has driven it every day for three years, is not.
We have a theory. The theory is that familiarity breeds a specific kind of blindness. You stop seeing your own car because your own car is just the thing you get into. The attendant sees a car. He sees it freshly, objectively, without the accumulated habit of ownership clouding his assessment.
He sees the tyre that you have been meaning to check since March.
THE RESPONSE OPTIONS
When the assessment is delivered, the vehicle owner has several options.
The first is immediate gratitude and compliance, which is the correct response and which most people, to their credit, eventually land on.
The second is mild defensiveness: “Yes, I know, I’ve been meaning to get that sorted.” This response is understood by both parties to mean: I did not know, but I would like to suggest that I was in the process of knowing.
The third is surprise so genuine that it briefly embarrasses everyone involved: “Wait, which tyre?” This is the honest response and there is nothing wrong with it, though it requires a willingness to be seen clearly by a man who has known about your tyre pressure longer than you have.
The fourth, which we have witnessed but will not endorse, is a brief argument, after which the person drives to the air pump and discovers that Sipho was right.
Sipho is always right.
CONCLUSION
The petrol station attendant who judges your tyre pressure is not, in fact, judging you. He is doing something more valuable and more specific: he is paying attention to your vehicle on your behalf, as a professional courtesy, without being asked and without charging extra for it.
The appropriate response is to check your tyres more often so that the assessment, when it comes, finds nothing to report.
We have been meaning to do this since March.
The Helderburger Motoring Desk would like to thank Sipho. Both front tyres are now at 32 PSI. The rear right is at 31, which is close enough and Sipho has not said anything further about it.
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