Jiffy Lube

Well, it's that time of the year again. Time for car registration. I took my car in to Jiffy Lube on Saturday and was once again reminded how much I LOVE that place!! My brother, Eli, and I have a sort of obsession with Jiffy Lube.

It all started a few years ago when Eli got his new car. He called me up one day asking where he should take it for it's first oil change. So, I sent him to Jiffy Lube. About 20 minutes later he called me and before even saying hello, he screamed at the top of his lungs, "I LOVE JIFFY LUBE!!!" And for anyone who knows how dramatic Eli is, you know exactly how the rest of the conversation went. He went on and on telling me how amazing it was. They washed his windows and vacuumed out his car. They were quick and had great customer service. He was definitely preaching to the choir...I already knew how great they were, why else would I send him there?? I am pretty sure we we had the longest conversation about about Jiffy Lube that has ever occurred in the history of the world (including with the Jiffy Lube executives).

we chatted about how we should both quit our jobs and work for Jiffy Lube as promoters (like they have working for all the fancy clubs in LA (can you tell I am addicted to the Hills?)) We would plot out our entire careers working for Jiffy Lube and talking about how easy it would be because we already loved the place!

This weekend was no different. I dropped my car off on Saturday morning and went with my mom to run some errands. When I went back to pick up my car, they thought they had locked my keys in the car. Luckily, they hadn't. When they finally found them, the guy who was working (who happened to be my parents neighbor) gave me a discount for all the confusion. It was so fabulous! And...they do the registration renewal right there in the store, you don't even have to mail it in and wait for your registration stickers to come in the mail!!!! Oh how I love Jiffy Lube.

The point of all this rambling about Jiffy Lube is that last year something really embarrassing happened to me when I took my car in for inspection. There is a Jiffy Lube really close to where I work, so I decided to run to Jiffy Lube on my lunch break and get my inspection done. So I ran over and waited in the waiting room while they completed the inspection. Once my car was ready I hopped in and drove back to work. When I got back to work I turned the car off, pulled my keys out of the ignition and opened the door. As soon as I opened the door there was a dinging in my car. I could not figure out what the problem was. I tried playing with all the nobs and buttons to see if I could get the noise to stop, but had no luck. I worked with a bunch of guys and figured that one of them would know what was going on. Once I got back inside I whined to everyone I saw, telling them about the annoying dinging sound and how I could not get it to stop. Right away a few of them said, "I think you left your lights on". I drive a Chevy Malibu...it's one of those cars where the lights are always on. You don't have to turn them on or off. So of course I assured them that that was not the problem. Since neither of them could tell me what the real problem was, I decided to call my dad. While whining to my dad, I realized that Jiffy Lube must have done something to my car during the inspection. That would explain this odd dinging. I was ticked!! I could not believe this place I was so impressed with, I had told all my friends and family about and had been so loyal to all these years could have done something like this to me!! My dad referred me to my brother in law who knows more about cars than any of us. I called Jeff and he told me to go out to my car and try a bunch of things. The first thing he told me to try was turning the lights on and off. Of course I scoffed at his suggestion and said "Duh Jeff I can't, the lights are always on, there isn't a way to turn them on!!" My brother in law is so sweet, he told me to bring my car over that night and he would get it figured out, I am sure he knew the problem and that there was no way we were going to get it taken care of over the phone. Before I left work that night I decided to call Jiffy Lube to see if I could stop by so they could look at it since they were the culprits. It was so weird, the guy who answered the phone had the same suggestion that everyone else had. He told me to go out and check the lights. I sat on the phone and argued with him for about 10 minutes about how it couldn't be the lights and how THEY were the ones that broke my car, and they better look at it and get it fixed right away! That night I walked out to my car and got in, ready to go to Jiffy Lube to have them take a look, and suddenly I noticed a nob on my car that I had never seen before. It had a picture of a light on it....then suddenly it hit me...I turned the nob slowly and the dinging stopped.

Penny

I remember as a child waking up on Saturday mornings to watch Saturday morning cartoons. We had the best cartoons back then. After watching cartoons with my sister Krisanda, we would watch Pee Wee's Playhouse. For anyone who doesn't remember or is too young to remember... Pee Wee's Playhouse was an absolutely ridiculous mess of skits, secret words for the day, cartoons, lame jokes, and silly lines like "I don't make monkeys, I train 'em!" and "if you love it so much why don't you marry it?". It usually involved Pee Wee Herman parading around with a pair of giant underwear on his head or holding a special ceremony to marry the fruit salad he loved so dearly. Often during the episode they would play a "Penny Cartoon". This was a cartoon with a claymation girl named Penny who always rambled on and on about the most random things. These cartoons always started with the line "Hi, my name is Penny" and then continued with this rambling for about 2 minutes straight without a pause while this girl tried to make sense of the world. No matter what was going on we always laughed and laughed.

Several years later when we had grown out of the whole Saturday morning cartoon routine, Krisanda, Eli and I were invited to a slumber party at our crazy Uncle Will's. He was attending school at BYU and living in an apartment in Provo, so we felt quite cool going to our "rad" Uncle Will's for a slumber party. About halfway through the night, he popped in a video (I am positive this was an attempt to get us to shut up and go to sleep, as I am sure we were as obnoxious as anyone could possibly be at our age). We watched several episodes of Pee Wee's Playhouse (in spanish for some odd reason) recorded from TV on a VHS tape with our Uncle Will and laughed and laughed.

So as I sit here creating this blog (as it seems like no one can survive anymore without one), I can't help but think back to those days and those "Penny Cartoons " and how this blog is much like a "Penny Cartoon" of my own. A place for me to come and ramble about the most obscure things. A place for me to try to make sense of the world.