I went to Texas A&M University for four of my five years
of higher education. For the first two
years, I lived in a dorm on campus. The
parking for live-in residents was sparse and scattered all over the university
grounds, so quite often I found myself having to park on the other side of
campus near the Rec Center. The long
walk didn’t really bother me much unless I had groceries or had come back
loaded down with stuff from a weekend with the parental units.
No, the real issue with those parking lots was the
trees. Whoever had designed them had
done so with hundreds of trees in rows throughout the entire parking lot. They provided quite a bit of shade and made
an otherwise ugly parking lot quite pretty.
So, why was this an issue, you might ask? Because with trees comes birds, thousands of
them. And with birds comes bird crap,
tons of it…literally. To the
university’s credit, after receiving a lot of complaints about the birds, they
tried some creative methods to move the bird population along.
The first thing they tried was simply having maintenance
people in trucks driving around the parking lot honking their horns. This only had a moderate success rate, as the
birds mostly just flew from one tree to another to get away from the crazy,
honking humans. So, that’s when the
maintenance guys decided to up their game to a method with much greater
success…firing very loud guns with blank cartridges at various points around
the parking lot. This imminent threat
had the desired reaction as the birds fled in droves to other trees around the
city.
What the maintenance guys could not have anticipated was the
unforeseen side effect of firing off guns around flocks of birds. They literally scared the crap out of them,
which the birds let loose as they were fleeing, all over the cars below
them. I happened to have my car parked
under a tree during this ordeal, so I got it worse than most. Not to mention that I really only drove my
car on weekends for the most part, choosing to walk anywhere I needed to
go. So, when I came back to my car after
a week of them firing guns off at the birds, I couldn’t find it. Where I had left my car, was a white,
automobile-shaped pile of bird crap.
I am not exaggerating when I tell you that it was completely
covered, every inch of it, in bird crap.
I had to get an ice scraper out to clean the windows just so I could
drive it. It was Sunday, and my
girlfriend and I were on our way to church.
She took one look at my car, folded her arms, shook her head, and said,
“It’s not going to happen. I am not
showing up to church in that literal pile of crap.” But I couldn’t just leave it like this,
because bird crap can be corrosive to a car’s paint job, so I convinced her to
go with me to try to find one of those “free” car washes that high school kids
were always putting on.
And as luck would have it, I found a free car wash near to
campus. When we pulled up, you should
have seen the dejected faces, the “you’ve got to be kidding me looks,” and the
scattering of kids to other cars to avoid the white monster. But one brave girl sucked it up and came over
to evaluate the effort needed to get it done.
All she asked in return was the opportunity to take a picture first. Apparently, I was the winner of the worst car
ever in the history of free car washes, and they wanted to document this
momentous occasion. After taking a
picture, which my girlfriend refused to be in, they set to work hosing and
scrubbing my car. The bird
crap…would…not…come…off.
It was caked and dried on there so hard, that no amount of
scrubbing or washing it would soften or remove it. They tried rags, bristled brushes, and
finally someone brought out steel wool.
The steel wool finally broke through with a lot of muscle and force, and
slowly, slowly they were able to chisel away the bird crap. It slid off the car in slabs of white crust,
slamming into the ground and shattering in piles of odiferous rottenness. What I didn’t realize until afterwards was
that the steel wool also took off the first layer of paint, which I had to get
repaired later.
Yes, those kids earned every penny of the $5 I gave them for
washing my car that day.
