Friday, June 01, 2007

Good at getting a job vs. good at the job

The indispensible Dan Baum, author of The New Yorker's blog-extraordinaire, New Orleans Journal, gives us an object lesson at something we modern Americans ought to know but don't: You can't judge a book by its cover.

Unfortunately, we're all about The Cover in this day and age.
Read on:

We decided to take the car out to the gleaming Toyota dealership in suburban Metairie. Fit men in matching Toyota golf shirts took down information on a complicated form, technicians in spotless uniforms came from the back to puzzle out the repair, and our customer-care representative produced an estimate that represented our dining-out budget for a month. We decided simply to buy a new door handle and have the work done elsewhere. We approached the parts counter, where a man looked up the handle we needed on a computer, printed out a complicated receipt that we had to take to the cashier, and gave us a bubble-wrapped package covered in bar codes and numbers.

One day not long after that, Margaret came home from running errands in Treme and told me about a group of men she’d seen sitting around a funky garage at the corner of Dumaine and North Prieur Streets. “They waved and smiled at me,” she said. “The place had great murals of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X painted on the garage doors.” Those being sufficient criteria for choosing a New Orleans body shop, I drove out to the garage in Treme. Several middle-aged African-American men sat on torn vinyl chairs enjoying the morning sunshine, and a short, bald white guy with tattoos all over his neck was running a sanding wheel over the Bondoed fender of a Mustang GT. Tools lay on the crumbly ground; it looked like the range of equipment didn’t go much beyond the sander than a ball-peen hammer, a couple of socket wrenches, and an old bathtub filled with dirty water, for finding tire leaks.

The tattooed man introduced himself in a banjo-string Florida accent as Juicy. He said he could install the handle, hammer out the dents and scratches around it, paint the door, and touch up all the other dings on the car for two hundred and twenty-five dollars. I watched his eyes as he talked, trying to figure out whether he meant to dismantle my car, sell off the parts, deny he’d ever seen it, and threaten me with an ass-whupping if I complained.

As we were talking under the lurid, stylized figures of Martin Luther King, Jr., exclaiming, “I Have a Dream,” and Malcolm X, exhorting me to “Know Thy Self,” a huge man named Lloyd got up from his chair, walked over to us, and, in a low, rumbling voice, offered to detail the car inside and out—shampoo the seats and rugs and everything—for eighty dollars. This Toyota is the first new car I’ve ever owned, and I’ve long harbored bourgeois dreams of having it “detailed.” I wasn’t even completely sure what the word meant, but I knew it was something my software-executive friends in Boulder do to their cars and I liked the idea.

“We are all Christian people here,” another man called to me from his chair. He knew what buttons to push: “We’ll get it done right. Have your work done right here. Right here in this community.”

I told them I’d be back in a week to have the work done. Margaret and I wanted to wait until the last possible minute before moving back to Boulder, because, between the potholes, lunatic drivers, and narrow streets, New Orleans is hard on automobile exteriors. Juicy and I arranged to meet at the garage the following Thursday at 9 A.M. When he wasn’t there by nine-thirty, Lloyd said, “He’ll be along,” but I began to think about that spotless dealership in Metairie. Juicy finally showed up at nine-forty-five and I handed over the keys. “I need it by five,” I said, because I had an appointment to be on a live radio show at six. Then I rode off on my bike and worried all day.
SO, WHERE DO YOU THINK this story is going? What is your first instinct? What is the rational thing to think . . . to do?

Is Baum a genius or a doofus? Read the whole thing and find out.

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