Undercover...

One of my neighbors commented the other day about my car being under a cover. (Not a carport-type cover -- more like what you girls out there would probably call a "car cozy".) It occurred to me that I can always tell car-people from non-car-people by their reactions to seeing me put the cover on.

Car-people are the predictable ones -- they already know that exposure to the sun and other environmental factors is bad for cars, and immediately recognize the utility of keeping one covered up if you want to preserve its appearance and the proper condition of the rubber, paint, plastics and fabrics. They say things like "Oh, your paint will last a lot longer that way" or "I bet your interior stays a lot cooler in the summer" or even "I used to have one of those for my Porsche, but was too lazy to use it all the time".

Non-car-people, on the other hand, produce a much more varied range of comments when they see me pull this big wad of space-age polymerized fabric out of my trunk and fit it over the car. My mom refers to it as "putting your car back in its bag". I get asked if I'm trying to hide the car, whether the car feels cold, etc. Somebody once suggested it was a burial shroud for the car -- perhaps destined to be dug up from the post-apocalyptic ruins by a future race of intelligent machines, who notice the faint Mazda emblem worn in the fabric and decide that it's an artifact of their god.