getting the car inspected
Oct. 23rd, 2017 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeI still haven't managed to do any more Inktober sketches, in spite of some excellent prompts, but here's a doodle of a young woman who was in the waiting room at the mechanic's where I went to get my car inspected.
She was perched on one of those molded-plastic chairs that have depressions for your bottom and your back. She had her legs drawn up to her chest and was concentrated fixedly on her phone. She was pretty, but nervous seeming, someone I'd expect to express themselves in waves of rapid speech.
She was having a Prius fixed. Unrelated to whatever its troubles were, it was missing its rear hubcaps. Before it had been missing one, but now it was missing both. "Oh well--now it's symmetrical," the woman said.
One of the mechanics chatted with her as she was paying, from which he (and I) learned that she'd moved to this area from California, which she'd left because of the--what do you guess? Guess anything! I was thinking she'd say wildfires. (Answer is below the picture.)
She said traffic. Which I know is bad, based on what friends have told me. But so bad that you move state? And not just to a different state, but 3,000 miles away? There's more to this story than meets the eye. Or ear. It's none of my business, but I do wonder.
She was perched on one of those molded-plastic chairs that have depressions for your bottom and your back. She had her legs drawn up to her chest and was concentrated fixedly on her phone. She was pretty, but nervous seeming, someone I'd expect to express themselves in waves of rapid speech.
She was having a Prius fixed. Unrelated to whatever its troubles were, it was missing its rear hubcaps. Before it had been missing one, but now it was missing both. "Oh well--now it's symmetrical," the woman said.
One of the mechanics chatted with her as she was paying, from which he (and I) learned that she'd moved to this area from California, which she'd left because of the--what do you guess? Guess anything! I was thinking she'd say wildfires. (Answer is below the picture.)
She said traffic. Which I know is bad, based on what friends have told me. But so bad that you move state? And not just to a different state, but 3,000 miles away? There's more to this story than meets the eye. Or ear. It's none of my business, but I do wonder.
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Date: 2017-10-25 07:38 am (UTC)I think opinions on the badness of California's traffic depend on location, schedule, and length of commute. When I was in the regular workforce, I mostly had commutes of half an hour or less, but I did have one temp job where the morning commute was an hour and 15 minutes if I left home by 6:15am, but up to an hour longer if I left after 6:30am. That was wearing enough that I was really glad it was a temp job. A bad commute (or, worse, a series of bad commutes) might be enough to get a person to leave the state, if they either had few ties here or had some connections in their destination state...
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Date: 2017-10-25 10:52 am (UTC)Yeah, I was thinking connections in your destination state might be a reason to choose a place so far away from where you started.