Via Dustbury and Autoblog, here is a video of a news reporter who doesn’t know how to use an ice scraper:

She takes the correction in really good humor. And in her defense, she apparently made her way up to Washington State by way of Los Angeles, where you don’t have to deal with this sort of thing often.

I can relate. I remember when I first moved to Deseret from Colosse. It’s not that there was never ice in Colosse that needed to be scraped off, but you never needed more than a credit card and taking anything more than a hand-scraper was a waste of automobile interior real estate. Snow? The last time I had seen snow that was still snow when it hit the ground was 1987.

So it was a bit of a shock.

Also, I had to learn quite a bit about these things. Including the ubiquitous design of those scraper-brushes, and how they worked.

Another thing I learned was that below a certain temperature, even cars that are otherwise in good working order won’t start. I remember my shock when I arrived and people would go into the convenience store while leaving their cars running. Back in Colosse, that was asking to get your car stolen, it seemed to me. But people there did it all the time. Was crime really all that non-existent? Not the case, it turned out. It was just that the comparative risk of a car failing to restart versus the less common but more severe stolen car… well, the frequency of the former trumps the severity of the latter.

What I’ve discovered since, I’ve determined, is that the concern over the stolen car is most likely pretty foolish to begin with. It’s just something you only notice when stopping your car and taking the key out of it takes some risks. This goes into a bit about the regional and generational differences in how we think about crime and the risk of crime. A subject for a post at a later date. Right now we’re talking about ice scrapers.

As it turns out, the scraper-brush is almost a perfectly sized broom for Lain to push around the outside deck when she wants to mimic me pushing around the deck broom. It is every bit as cute as you imagine.