A Son Borrows His Dad’s Car

A Case Example of Being a Shit

A 35 year-old man, who did not give his name, told a story of borrowing his father’s car for a drive in the country with a woman friend. Deep into a forest, they ran out of gas. The man walked to a nearby farmhouse where someone there told him he was welcome to their fuel but they could not guarantee how good it was.

The man dumped three of four gallons into the tank, along with a straw he for some reason also used to get the gas into the car. The car started and the couple got to their destination. Taking the advice of a mechanic, they filled the tank with high octane gas and two containers of dry gas to compensate for what might have been bad fuel. He also hoped the straw would somehow dissolve.

Back home a few days later, the man’s father asked, “How did the car run?” The son said just fine. The father said, “That’s funny. It stalls out on me.” The son had nothing to say.

Guilt-ridden, the son phoned Click and Clack, the car experts whose radio show Car Talk is syndicated on National Public Radio, and asked their advice. Either Click or Clack told the son that he had messed up big time. What the son should have done the moment he returned the car was to tell his father that the car ran pretty good but it did stall out a couple of times.

This is a pre-emptive cover-up, a kind of CYA (cover your ass). From some points of view, but probably not the father’s, it is also humorous, a kind of Clever Fox enactment of being a shit. Click (or Clack) did not miss a beat when he made this suggestion, which supports the idea that he possesses automatic capacities for activating well-developed schemas related to humor and to deviousness. The son, however, lacked this capacity, but he may have learned a lesson from Click (or Clack).

Taking a more serious turn, Click and Clack gave the guilt-ridden son their wisdom about whether anything he had done had caused the stalling. Their final thought was the fuel injectors might need flushing out. Whether the son suggested this remedy to his father and came clean about the bad fuel was not part of the radio show.