Glebe wins special award
Business group bestows honour
A national association has singled out the Glebe for top honours – members of the Car Repair Alliance of Canada (CRAC) chose the Glebe as this year’s recipient of its coveted Golden Muffler award. The prize, based on votes by car repair specialists from across the country, honours the town, village or city neighbourhood that most contributed to the financial success of Canada’s car repair business in the past year.
The award is the brainchild of three brothers – Boyd, Floyd and Lloyd Krankcase, owners of Wrecks ’R Us Repair Shop in Upper Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia.
Every December the brothers – nicknamed Oily, Greasy and Gassy – carefully tally votes cast by CRAC members across Canada. This year’s race was tight, but in the end the Glebe beat out Wreckhouse, Newfoundland and Aklavik, Northwest Territories for the top spot.
The Krankcase brothers recently visited the Glebe to prepare for handoff of the Golden Muffler in a special ceremony coming up soon. They kindly agreed to sit down for an interview with the Glebe Report.
GR: Welcome to the Glebe. How did we earn this honour?
Oily: We did a tour around the neighbourhood yesterday. We now understand why the guys and gals in the car repair business here describe the Glebe as “the gift that keeps on giving.”
GR: How so?
Greasy: Let’s get down to brass tacks or, as we say in our business, brass ball bearings. We learned that every spring the City of Ottawa installs traffic-calming flex-sticks around the Glebe. The sticks can put more twists and turns in Glebe streets than a backroad in Cape Breton. And that in turn triggers problems with rack-and-pinion steering systems that our folks fix up.
Gassy: We saw lots of speed bumps. Anybody going more than 10 klicks an hour over them a few times will be coming to our people for a BJRJ. Sorry. That’s a ball joint replacement job.
Oily: And holy doodle, boy, do you folks have some whopper potholes! After the rain from the day before, the water in them looks deeper than the Bay of Fundy at high tide. And their edges look higher than Hopewell Rocks. That would give the guys and gals here plenty of front-end wheel alignment work.
Gassy: Yeah. And we can’t get over how your city plows leave a big hump of snow and ice at the end of everyone’s driveway. You’d need a pickaxe to take it out. Anyway, those humps give our folks lots of broken tail pipes and bent wheel rims to fix.
Greasy: And the humps might even rip out the undercarriage of a car!
GR: Well, you three have really helped us understand why the Glebe deserves this honour. Thank you so much.
Oily: The Glebe is a pretty neighbourhood full of great people. If folks just keep their eye on the road, make sure their tires are properly inflated and think about what we’ve said, they’ll do just fine!
On Saturday, April 1 between 10 a.m. and noon, the Golden Muffler will be on display at the offices of the Glebe Report for those who have not yet realized that this is Bob’s latest April Fool’s spoof. Bob reports it may be the last of his many years of spoofs. He invites others in the Glebe so inclined to take up the challenge.
