When I want to know if someone I meet at a party is a serious car person, if they mean business, I innocently ask that individual about getting a custom alignment done. If their response isn’t absolute blinding rage and a list of half-shouted, half-growled epithets about nearly every alignment rack in town, I’ve got my answer.
Alignments are a tricky business indeed, a shaky contract between a customer obsessed with precision and an employee who probably drove the previous customer’s minivan off the rack and into the side of the building. Many of my fellow racers had resorted to doing their own alignments at home, trading out the crudity of string and improvised wooden jigs for the opportunity to not have a stroke in the stained-flypaper waiting room of a Minit Lube.
Sure, I did my alignments at home, too, but I had a trick up my sleeve. After kidnapping a series of NASA and self-driving car engineers, I had constructed a crude android capable of aligning my harem of shitboxes with multiple-significant-digits of precision. His name was Thrusty, and I loved him like my own son until he stripped out a camber adjustment bolt on my Impreza’s lateral links and I had to kill him with a slide hammer.
I will always remember his dying words: “something must be bent in the suspension, we need to order in some new parts before you can go.”
