Since work is a big part of my life, and since I node about my life, it's only fair to provide definitions, even if they are not needed right away. A body shop is where you bring your car's body to be repaired when you collide with something you were not supposed to, another car, a guardrail, a pedestrian, a stop sign, a fence, or the all time favorite, a light pole or telephone pole. We fix the outsides, and if it is bad enough and you find a body shop located within a dealership, we will send it where it needs to go to get the insides fixed as well. Air bags and air conditioning, mostly. Front end collisions are always messy for the car and for all front seat drivers and riders involved. The car accidents I normally see are front end collisions, but with the onslaught of more SUV's on domestic streets, I'm seeing more rear end car wrecks in the year 2000.

We also will paint your car in the areas of destruction, trying to make it look like it had never been wrapped around that tree when you were too drunk to hail a cab. Or when you weren't looking, while you were on your cell phone, checking your hair in the mirror, or when someone else was just not behaving himself behind the wheel.

We were hit with a city wide hailstorm during the last week of January this year, right around the time people start putting up decorations for Mardi Gras. The French Quarter, comically, was hit the hardest. As were we, the peons you brought your cars to. In such cases, even the most decrepit vehicles will get a brand spanking new paint job, since hail knows no mercy. This was the first time I had seen a hailstorm and in places it was a large as golf balls. It was trippy to see miles of cars dented like those golf balls these hailstones were compared to. There are, I believe, over half a million people in the city proper alone, and I'm sure, at least half that many cars. We are still trying to fix them, 5 months later.

The summer is here, our busiest time. All those teens out of school and on the road, running into each other. The ensuing heat and flash thunderstorms help too. It's times like these where I wish you people would just learn to drive.