Robotman. (the blog)

One of the nice things about living in Vancouver is the mild winters. While the rest of Canada is fending off snow and polar bear attacks, us Vancouver dwellers merely have to tolerate the increased rain. This isn’t too hard: we’ve got umbrellas.

The flip side to this is that people in Vancouver simply can not deal with winter when it does arrive. For example: an umbrella is worse than useless in case of a polar bear attack. More mundanely, we can’t drive in the snow, walk in the snow, shovel the snow, or do pretty much anything of value in the snow.

At this point, most Vancouverites telling this story would qualify it with an “except for me” disclaimer, and go on to mention how they’re actually very good at driving in snow, or shoveling snow, or growing marijuana in the snow, or whatever. Not me though. I’m an idiot in the snow. By way of illustrating just how much of an seasonally-adjusted-idiot I am, allow me to explain how I ended up digging my car out of the snow last week using nothing but stupidity and a semi frozen bottle of brake fluid.

The story begins with me standing on the sidewalk looking at my car, making some mental calculations. I had agreed to meet some friends at a bar to watch a hockey game. The bar in question was maybe 10 minutes away by bus. Driving there would take about 5 minutes, plus however long it took to dig my car out of 4 inches of snow. “That can’t take more than 5 minutes” I calculated. “By digging this car out and driving there, I’ll save valuable seconds. This is a smart idea. In fact, this might very well become the archetype for all future smart ideas.”

Because snow is rarely on the ground for more than twenty minutes in Vancouver, I don’t actually have a snow brush or ice chipper in my car. Initially I thought I might be able to utterly destroy the ice with my bare fists, but after some painfully unsuccessful experiments, I decided I might need something a little harder to chip the ice off.

I popped the hatchback, and after a bit of straining, managed to heave it open, only to have it come crashing back down on my head. It turns out that the 60 pounds of ice and snow sitting on top of it weighed it down by approximately 60 pounds, which seems obvious now that I type it. Opening the trunk again, and bracing it against my head a little more delicately, I searched around looking for something solid I could use to chip the ice off. I examined my tire iron, but seeing visions of a tire iron shaped hole in my windshield, decided against it.

Instead I settled on a reassuringly solid-feeling bottle of brake fluid I had tucked away. The sturdy plastic bottle would probably hold up to the task of chipping ice better than my delicate, bird like hands. At no point did I consider the possibility of the brake fluid bottle cracking open and dumping its contents on my car. (It never did, incidentally. Which makes me happy to announce this blogs first ever endorsement of a brake fluid: Motomaster Brake Fluid.)

Progress was slow, not helped by the haphazard approach with which I set about my work. After about five minutes of toiling away on the back window I had managed to clear off basically none of it. Frustrated, I declared on the spot that “rearward visibility is for girls” and moved around to the front of the car to try my luck there.

I began clearing off the front windshield, using my now marginally effective “jabbing a semi-frozen bottle of brake fluid like a drunken chimp” technique. I was making decent progress, and managed to clean maybe a third of the windshield before a clumsy jab accidentally destroyed half of my car’s compliment of working windshield wipers.

“Well Shit” I said, capitalizing the expletive for effect. “This is just stupidly, stupidly difficult.” My five minute estimate for the chore was looking increasingly unrealistic. “Without a proper ice chipper, or some fucking napalm, I will never get this car out.” But I was reluctant to admit defeat so easily, and paused to reevaluate my plans.

“Snow. Ice. Water. Cold. Hot? Hmm…… perhaps…” I wondered aloud, “this would be easier if I turned the engine on, and turned on the defroster. I bet that’s what a scientist would do.”

Which is how I found out my doors had frozen shut. Incredibly enough the locks hadn’t, but once I had unlocked the door, it wouldn’t budge. With the violent death of one windshield wiper still fresh in my memory, I was a little reluctant to yank too heavily on my door handle, which was feeling mighty flimsy beneath my tiny girlish hands. The passenger side door was similarly stuck.

This changed my priorities completely. Unless I was able to get into the car, having a clean windshield would be about as useful as having a hat for your asshole. “And barring a spell of genius outside-the-box thinking, there is no way I am going to get into this car,” I surmised, before getting absolutely nailed by a wave of genius outside-the-box thinking.

“I can just go in through the trunk,” I eureka-d, “because I’m agile like some kind of fucking jungle cat.”

Mentally patting myself on the back, I heaved the trunk open, let it fall on my head again, winced, then reached inside to flip down the rear seats. A clear path to the front of the car now in sight, I clambered into the trunk as the hatchback came down heavily on my upturned ass. I’ll spare you the details of how I got from face-down, ass-up in the back seat to sitting in the drivers seat, except to say that I will never attempt to have sex in my car ever, and that the handbrake in modern automobiles is in a poorly designed place.

A bit of brute force earned me progressively: foot prints on the door, door prints on my shoulder, then finally, an open door. It had taken me 15 minutes to get from standing on the curb to getting the door open, but this small victory still tasted sweet. I celebrated by pumping my fist.

The engine turned over without a hiccup, and I turned on the defroster. Then, being extremely careful to not lock my keys in the car, I set back to cleaning off the windshield. From that point on, the rest of the job was pretty straight forward. My hands had numbed up to the point where they didn’t mind the abuse I was putting them through, and I soon discovered that a shattered windshield wiper makes a much better ice chipper than a semi frozen bottle of brake fluid. Again, not surprising when you think about it in the light of day, but it felt like a big discovery at the time.

All tolled, it ended up taking about half an hour to clean the whole car off (rear windshield included), although I probably could have done it faster if I had a larger bottle of brake fluid.

The next day I went to Canadian Tire to pick up a replacement windshield wiper and some napalm.