In general, I don't approve of women being helpless (or pretending to be helpless) in order to get men to do things. For example, I loathed clients who couldn't/wouldn't use a hammer or put a nail in the wall and waited for their husbands to do it for them. I am reasonably competent and usually ethical and expect the same from other people. However....
Car stuff. I just can't stand it. I don't want to haggle when I buy one. I have no clue what to do with one if something goes wrong. Frankly, I'd rather not even drive one and long for a city with good public transportation.
And, on the stuff I can do... I still don't want to do it. Twice now, in the past couple of months, I've accepted when random men saw me doing something fairly basic, something I was fully capable of doing, and offered to do it for me. I think I should probably feel ashamed.
In July, my mother came to visit. She falls asleep when driving, so my father drove her to the midway point between their home and mine and I met them there (a gas station/convenience store) to pick her up. I arrived first and noticed one of my back tires was low. I drove around to the air machine and got out of my car. Before I could even put in the quarters, some nice man offered to put the air in the tire. I let him. He even checked the air pressure of the other three tires.
Last night, I was telling my friends that I thought I needed to have transmission fluid added because the car had been bucking and having trouble getting into gear for a while. My friend Greg chastised me (and scared me) for letting it go so long, told me about blowing out his entire transmission years ago. He warned me not to wait til Monday. We weren't in my car and knew nobody would be sober enough to do it by the time they took me home, so we stopped for a bottle of transmission fluid and they gave me detailed instructions for doing it myself.
This afternoon, I headed out to the parking lot to take care of it. Before I could finish raising the hood, a guy who lives here offered to help. I'm embarrassed to say that I let him. It wasn't even a matter of deferring to an expert. I had to gently tell him that I'd been told to check the level and add more with the motor running. I knew more about it than he did (thanks to the instructions from friends). But, he still wanted to "rescue" me by doing it... and I still let him. I never even had to get my hands dirty.
In both cases, I was really grateful for the help, but I wonder if I should be ashamed for letting them do something I could have managed on my own. When you guys offer to do things like this, do you want us to let you? Do you enjoy being the hero? Or are you secretly thinking that women should learn to take care of their own d*** cars?
