smile, you're on candid camera!

Someone wrote to me not too long ago that she liked the self-deprecating humor of my blog. Well, here goes...story time or story telling on ETG for all of you to enjoy.
I remember watching Candid Camera when I was a little girl and laughing hysterically. The gist of the show was that a hidden camera would capture people's reactions to different situations. And then at some point the camera would be revealed to the person through the famous tag line, "Smile, you're on candid camera" which would make audience members and viewers alike laugh even harder as we watched the reaction of the person who'd just been filmed.
Well, on Monday, at the car wash I kept waiting for someone to jump out and say "Smile, you're on candid camera" as I unsuccessfully tried to get my car to cooperate with the car wash.
I punched in the code that I'd received when I'd paid the extra few dollars for a car wash after I had filled up my car. "Drive forward" glowed in green on the sign in front and me and "drive forward" I did. Only to realize that I had to line my tire up with the tire guide. Like a bad deja vue, I had a flashback of being in this car wash some years ago and having trouble getting my tire in just the right position. Of being afraid I was going to pop the tire in my attempts to drive forward in just the right place. So I took a deep breath and thought, "No sweat, Elizabeth, surely it's not that tough. You were just having a bad spatial reference day that day." Well, Monday was another one of those days.
I moved forward carefully only to feel some push back from the tire guide. Damn. Okay, I will not lose my cool. I will try again. More resistance. Hmmm...maybe if I hop out of the car and look at where I'm supposed to be guiding the tire I bet I can do it. Against my better judgment I opened the car door, half afraid that the water from the car wash would begin spraying down on me...but knowing that couldn't happen because I couldn't get the tire in the right place to "trip" the switch to tell the carwash to start!!! Calm. This is not rocket science. Just get the tire in between the metal tubes.
Or maybe not.
After four or five (okay, six? seven?) attempts I realized this was not getting any better. All of my geometry troubles related to understanding spatial concepts came back to me. I knew it was "fish or cut bait" time. I figured I'd already been fishing for a good 5-7 minutes and that it was time to admit that I needed to try again on another day.
Now the trick is that once you are in a car wash and you decide that you need to get out, you only have a few options. Try to drive over the metal tire guide that has been your nemesis, maneuver around it, or hit reverse and drive out of the car wash the same way you came in. When there is another car waiting (like there was on Monday...I can only imagine what they were thinking!), option 3 is not an option. Option 1 was not really an option either given my fear of what that metal tire guide would do to my tire. So, I was stuck with option 2. Somehow, I got out of the car wash without a nick on my car, a hole in my tire, or a drop of water having touched the car.
Carwash: 1, ETG: 0
Better luck next time, ETG.
Oh, and for the record, there was no candid camera as far as I know. But if there had been you would have all be laughing at how ridiculous I looked walking around the inside of the car wash in the middle of my multiple attempts to line the tire up...and then eventually driving out of the car wash.
(Don't worry...from now on, I am only allowed to go to car washes where you don't have to line your car up with anything!)