Bewildered at the person - computer interface

When, as a student, I had to decide between putting petrol in my car or eating, the answer was obvious. I'd keep going for a while, the car wouldn't. Besides someone might give me food, nobody gave me petrol. The sort of cars I bought were cheap and unreliable. I spent hours messing with bits I didn't really understand. I was expert in stripping threads, drawing blood as I worked and dancing from side to side, dying to go to the toilet, but with oil stained hands determined to finish before the light failed. Those cars had carburettors and points and lots of things to twiddle.

It's ages since I've done anything other than check pressures or liquid levels on a car. Nowadays I pay for someone else, someone with a stronger bladder, to do it.

My current car tells me when it wants something. In fact it demands. The warnings for the 60,000 km oil change came on 2,000 km before. When I booked the car in they gave me a date three weeks hence. Today was hence.

Oil change, a couple of filters and plugs they said on the phone. I bought the service contract at the time I bought the car. For the dealer I suspect that one of the main reasons the contracts are good value is that it means you go to see them and that gives them the chance to sell you something else.

It's 2023 and there were no oily rags or overalls to be seen at a garage. Shiny desks, corporate image, computer tablets to sign and piped music instead. As the bloke stared at the computer screen I wondered. Do the bits of software on Spanish computers change the way they look every time? The service reception bloke kept squinting at the screen and looking puzzled. I've seen the same look at the Post Office; a look of surprise, slight bewilderment. They do it at the Post Office even when they're selling you one of those label things that now serves as a a stamp even though they must do that tens of times every day. It's the same in banks with everyday transactions. In government offices the first person calls over a second person to stare at the screen so they can look perplexed together.

“Ah, no, said the workshop man,” (who I presume takes in cars for service and repair every day of his working week), “no plugs this time. It'll be when you come back in August or September, or when you reach 60,000 km.” “But it's a 60k service now,” I said. He re-squinted. He showed me the screen, I pointed to the tick boxes on the screen where it said bujías, filtro de aceite, filtro de polen. “Ah, yes. Correct. New plug and new filters.”