Unusual days in the life of a body shop owner

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[I was in the auto body business for thirty seven years and every time I thought that nothing new could surprise me, I was usually wrong. Sometimes I have had to have the patience of a saint dealing with customers. I am going to tell you some humorous stories that have happened to my customers over the years while under my watch at Andy's Auto Body.

I recall an elderly woman coming to the shop with an older blue Lincoln. She told me that her dearly departed husband had been a Navy commander on an aircraft carrier. She wanted us to paint her car Battleship Gray to honor her late husband. Down deep I was certain that this was going to be one ugly Lincoln, but the customer is always right. We painted it Navy Gray just like she wanted. When the cleanup man brought the car around for the customer I could not believe my eyes. This car just cried out "Anchors away" and it make you want to salute when it pulled up. Now here is the funny part, the elderly lady said that after seeing it in gray she said it looked "ugly". The customer is always right but it sure was a waste of good Navy gray paint.

One day a lady's car was towed into the shop. The car was a Chevrolet. The entire front end of the car was almost flat like a pancake, there did not seem to have been any point of impact but this car looked like a piano had dropped from the sky onto the front end. When the customer finally showed up, she told me quite a story. It seems that she was on her way home for lunch and had decided to take a shorter route across Harris Lane in rural Alton. While in route to her home she came across a herd of cows slowly crossing the road headed to a barn owned by the man the road is named for. The lady decided that the cows were crossing way to slow to suit her. Our customer decided to honk at the cows to speed them up and she started honking while slowly moving forward. This honking and moving closer to the cows was a real bad idea, the first cow she honked at was so spooked by the noise that it seems the cow went airborne. This airborne cow would probably have not done any damage on landing except our lady was also startled by the cow in the air and she let the car move up under the cow. The cow which weighed about 800 pounds was killed when it landed right on the windshield and hood of this poor lady's Chevy. Not only did her car need fixed but the farmer wanted paid for his cow. I do not think she will be taking Harris Lane as a short cut anytime in the future.

A few years back a customer of ours was all packed up on a Saturday morning and headed out to meet some relatives for a picnic and apparently this person had spent the early morning hours baking a very large pot of baked beans. Unfortunate for our customer a car ran a stop sign and our customer plowed into the side of the other car. No one was hurt but it seems that upon impact of the two cars that the giant pot of beans went airborne. The bean pot crashed into the dash of the car and exploded all over the front seat, windshield, and doors. The wrecker came to pick up the car and parked it on their tow lot for the weekend since it was not drivable. It was a very hot summer weekend and it was Tuesday before we got the car towed to our shop. When we opened the door of the car we saw the beans, they had run down the defrost vents in the dash and they seemed to be growing a green slime on the outside of the beans. The beans were now not only green and slimy but they were also becoming rather aromatic. We literally had to replace the dash along with the collision repair. I guess it wasn't a very good day for a picnic.

The spring temperatures had been so hot one Spring when a lady tried to turn on her air conditioner for the first time that season.The odor that blew from her air conditioning ducts almost made her sick since it smelled so bad. I thought that she might have been exaggerating a little and ask her to demonstrate and reenact this odor for me. She had not exaggerated at all; I was feeling sick to my stomach myself and was in need of a breath of fresh air. This car smelled real bad and the smell was coming from inside the air conditioner ducts. We told the customer that we would have to take the dash out to find where this nasty odor was coming from. What we found was very unusual to say the least. A very rotten dead snake was wrapped around the air conditioner evaporator. The woman told us that her son had a pet snake but he had told her that the snake had gotten loose and slithered away. From what we saw the snake had found a very cool hiding place in Mom's car. It took us a long time and a good scrubbing to get her car back to normal. She said that her son would never have a pet snake ever again or he would need a new home himself.

Another quick story that is a little hard to believe. A little old man came in with an older Ford and he requested that we paint just one side of his car. I ask him to be a little more specific. The little old man wanted me to paint the driver's side of his car to look like an Alton police car. He said he could afford one side one side. I ask him why in the world he would want his car painted like that. He said that he was sick and tired of cars racing up and down Highland Avenue where he lived and he was going to park it on the street with the black and white side facing the traffic. We painted that car and it did sit on the street off and on for over a year and yes, he did slow down the traffic.

Over the years I loved all the stories and details of people's accidents and I miss talking with customers in general. But I sure have some good memories.