HOW PANTYHOSE CUT CAR REPAIR BILLS

You never know when some everyday item will heroically come to your rescue. My nylons changed the life of my first car.

Remember your first car? Ah, sweet memories of cherishing it. In my case, plenty of people definitely remember my first car very well, too.

My first car was the Russian make called Lada or Zhiguli. It was a marvelous piece of equipment that I acquired from a guy who ran it into a tree because he was celebrating his divorce too joyfully. I fixed it up, invested a bit of my hard-earned cash and time into it and was a proud owner of a purple, metallic, almost-as-good-as-new means of transportation with “made in Russia” written all over it, with all the consequences, of course.

Later I learned the nickname for that model: “Lego for adults.” It broke so often that I learned the design and mechanics of it inside out. It was cheaper to fix the easy stuff by myself than to go to a shop every time the car wouldn’t start. As you can imagine, it was a really appealing sight for the male population when a pretty, all-dressed-up, 20-year-old girl was opening the hood in the middle of the road. Everyone expected to see a puzzled desperate woman in distress who needed rescue, but instead I rolled up my sleeves and got my baby fixed in no time.

I definitely got a lot of attention and compliments, which was nice. But my stockings helped me get the best thing: free repairs from the owner of the shop I used all the time. How? Well, my generator belt tore, and the battery wasn’t going to last me until I got to the body shop. I decided to use one of my nylon stockings to replace the belt. Can you imagine the look on the mechanic’s face when he opened the hood and saw this mess? He was even more speechless when I unloaded a 24-pack of beer and asked him to take care of it quickly because I needed to be somewhere soon.

I had this car for almost five years, and in the end I got lots of free repairs from the shop owner before I finally decided to get rid of the car.