quote:

I’m not just a mechanical engineer, I tell the class of terrified youths as I wave around a cordless impact wrench with the safety off. I’m the mechanical engineer who specifically makes things hard to get at.

With this realization, one of the more “rural” looking fathers, possibly a boyfriend of a recent divorcee who is referred to by his first name by the kid, rears up and charges at me. He is one of the only human beings in this timeline who still does his own car maintenance, and has put together from my resume on LinkedIn and the words I am saying that I am the one responsible for how goddamn inaccessible the starter bolts are on his Yukon.

That wasn’t one of mine, sir, I try to tell him. As I do, I start to back up, but my escape is blocked by the bulk of the classroom’s holographic whiteboard. Upon being contacted by the cellphone in my hip pocket, the screen flickers to life, showing an image from my saved photos. In the photo, I am happily giving a thumbs-up while receiving an award for making the starter bolts on the Yukon goddamn inaccessible. It says so on the plaque.

Recovering from their stunned surprise, the other parents now arrive at a quick consensus that I am in fact history’s greatest monster. Even the patent lawyer, I notice with some horror, has turned against me, perhaps looking to atone for some sin I committed against him and his domestic-beer-swilling teenage buddies, repairing a beater car on some long-distant halcyon evening. I rack my mind to think what it could be and arrive at only the Lexus LS400. His rage is justified if so, I conclude.

Despite my building guilt slowing my mind in preparation of receiving the karmic punishment mandated by society, my primate forebrain immediately detects a chance to save the entire show once again. Before I can stop it, my foot has launched an eight-year-old’s chair, complete with occupant, directly into the face of Danny Cousin-Fucker in a Olympic-level soccer kick. That is, if soccer were a game that was played at the Olympics. This momentarily stuns him, and the crowd, horrified that I would risk the safety of an Innocent Child, turns its attention from me long enough to leap out the window and make good my escape.

I am thankful that I left the Volare idling outside, if only because I didn’t want to turn it off and risk having to replace that loving starter with its quarter-inch of clearance.