One of those moments in life when you are at your most vulnerable is when you are stranded alongside the road. As other cars and trucks go roaring by, you are stuck. Going nowhere.
A tire is flat or the gas tank is empty, or the battery has given up the ghost. Most of us would feel a rush of gratitude when the tow truck pulls up, the driver gets out and starts working to get us back on the road. But once when Charlene Taylor arrived to assist a driver, he refused her help.
The reason? Taylor is a woman. There are people who will think a woman is going to work on their car is “the greatest thing,” the Trinity High School graduate explained, but then there are those who are taken aback that a woman is working in what has long been considered the province of grease-covered, blunt-spoken guys. “I’ve gotten used to it,” said Taylor, a Washington resident.
“It’s one of those things.” Becky Tom, the co-owner of EQ Muffler in Uniontown, encountered the same resistance recently. An older man walked into the shop to ask about his daughter’s car.
Tom told him she could answer his questions – she is certified to work on vehicles – but he insisted on speaking to one of the men in the shop. “People can be like that,” Tom said. “There was no trust.
He wanted to hear nothing that I had to say.” The old joke has it that if men see a car with its hood up, they will automatically gravitate to it, furrow their brows and look over the engine, radiator, battery and be.
