Customer Service
downpour in January and
everyone all at once
needs new windshield wipers and
advertised special
says the store
will put them on for
free. Parking lot full
of cars with split cracked
dead on arrival wipers
so far gone they can’t wheeze out
one more sweep of the glass
the cars they are all needing new wipers bad
and it’s
Your Job
to do it. Here you come again
out into the wind-blown rain
hoodie soaked under
a flapping yellow poncho
cold hands fumbling with yet another set
of brand-new wipers and
this time you follow a solid woman in
pink rainboots that
simultaneously
look silly on her and
show up the grim drab
thoroughly miserable day
as she leads you to a
white SUV so bloated
you will have to lie on the hood
to reach which
pink boot lady does not like
but tolerates because
otherwise she’d have to do it.
Snap snap and done
you run back inside
the warm rubber-smelling store
cursing the idea of customer service
on a rainy
January
day.
1/10/19
Claudia McGill Writes Poetry, Did You Know That? 
Oh yes. That would be a miserable part of that job. I once had to install new wipers in winter rain – it immediately followed an intense storm of freezing rain that had finished off my wipers near the start of a long car journey – and I hope to never repeat that experience.
I remember back when cars did not have detachable wipers, so you pulled out the rubber and threaded the new rubber in, while the whole thing was still on the car. Now that was just horrible. And if it happened in bad weather..double horrible. I remember driving in a snowstorm (not far, luckily) with a bad wiper on the driver’s side and with no store to sell a wiper open, plus no way I could change it anyway, I drove with my head out the window. I was just crazy.
Yikes!
You bet. Between that and stalking the aisles at K Mart befuddled by trying to figure out which style fit my car, I HATED it when the windshield wipers started playing out.