December 3, 2014 Article

The Old Coot is a car snoop.

By Merlin Lessler

Old coots are snoops! Well, I am anyhow.  If I’m walking along the street passing by a line of parked cars, I can’t help myself; I glance in the window. It’s not that I’m looking for anything specific or casing the joint like a robber looking for something to steal; I’m just curious. So, I look. The inside of a car says a lot about the owner. If Human Resource people were smart, they’d check out the inside of a job candidate’s car instead of their Facebook page.

They’d find out if the applicant was a slob, with a dash buried under the remnants of take-out meals, a floor laden with empty coffee containers, Big Gulp cups, water bottles and the like. If the owner is especially neat and clean, it might be a sign of someone who is overly fastidious. Checking the inspection and registration stickers is worth a look too. You can find out if the owner is a slacker. A quick glance at a car yields a lot of useful data. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nosey old coot or an HR rep charged with hiring people.

Another interesting aspect of car snooping is that many car owners think their windows are made with one-way glass. They can see out, but you can’t see in. You see proof of this when you look in someone’s window and their lips are moving in sync with a song playing on the radio, or the driver is rehearsing the lecture they plan to give their teenage son when they get home for putting his dirty dishes in the dishwasher with the clean ones he was supposed to put away. (In spite of telling him to do it three times and leaving a note taped to the dishwasher door.) Speech “rehearsals” like this can get pretty entertaining, especially if you are in a car running parallel to the orator in slow traffic and they work themselves up so much they start to go ballistic.

But, that’s not the only proof that people think car windows are made with one-way glass. Moving lips are just the tip of the iceberg. Preening in the rearview mirror is another. Picking a piece of spinach out of one’s teeth, shaving with an electric razor and putting on lipstick are just a few of the personal appearance activities that take place. Food consumption is another common, in-car activity. There is nothing like pulling along side someone at a stop light and getting a grin from the driver with half a Big Mac and a handful of French fries sticking out of his mouth. The final proof is the people that do some serious mining in the nasal area while tooling along in traffic. If that doesn’t prove my one-way glass theory, I don’t know what does.