Six Things I Don't Understand, An Occasional Series. Part 1: Why Do People Leave Their Cars Idling?

While I confess the names Rita and Margriet in this blog's title were randomly chosen, the idea of some kind of bureau was actually my new-blog-name starting point. But not, as the dictionary defines a bureau, as an office for collecting and supplying information. No. More a source of, well, attempted answers to my own essentially pointless questions.

You know the sorts of questions I mean, like when you're waiting for a train and you suddenly think, what did happen to the Democrats? Or Germaine Greer?

Not questions with answers that ultimately have any bearing on life, other than to make you think for that brief moment, "Oh I see. Ok then," as you go on with buttering your toast or cleaning the fish tank.

So this occasional series is a series of just such questions, and this first question, why do people leave their cars idling, has long occupied me on quiet Tuesdays and sleepless nights.

But not just cars; truck drivers are worse than car drivers at leaving their vehicles idling. Perhaps they think it creates fifteen times more greenhouse effect-accelerating exhaust to stop and then re-start their trucks half an hour later when they're ready to leave, rather than just turning them off when they arrive? Perhaps idling truck drivers aren't the world's most annoying people but in fact leaders in saving this cosy blue and green planet we call home?

Perhaps car drivers think that starting their cars and driving away immediately will lead inevitably to the painful deaths of small penguins everywhere? Perhaps by leaving their cars idling ('warming up') for fifteen minutes before they drive away they are in fact stopping or at least retarding such penguin death-related horror?

No, not at all. Leaving things idling doesn't do shit. As Tony Davis, self-professed car nut, states in his seminal work The Ultimate Book of Car Hints (which I bought for $1.95 from a remainders book shop), "Every morning in nearly every street motorists warm their car engines by leaving their motors running. With modern engines this is virtually pointless and the motorists could save time and petrol by using a different approach."

Yes! Yes! Exactly! Turn your silly motors off. And stop gassing everyone in the playground next to where you park, you bastards.

So the answer to the first thing I don't understand, why people leave their cars/trucks idling, is: because some people are very, very silly.