"Where's your air hose?" he shouts.
"Sorry, I'm afraid it's broken," answers John.
Angry Man takes this news rather badly. "What the bloody hell! Broken - that's just great, that is! You guys are useless!" he screams.
I can't take any more.
"Look!" I interject, pointing at John. "He didn't break it! It was broken by cars driving over it fifty times a day!"
Angry Man turns and storms back to his Carina E, sitting forlorn beside the flaccid stub where the air hose should be.
Summer 2008. A dark, rain-drenched teatime. My beat-up old wreck has an NCT appointment in one hour. It’s ready to go, but I just want to check the tyres again. It's important to have the correct pressure; several of the tests depend on it.
But I can't find a working air hose.
At the first garage, the pump works fine but the numbers inside are illegible.
The second place has one of those "Select desired pressure" machines, where you set the pounds per square inch and then just wait till it beeps; unfortunately, some joker has set it at 51 – explosively high – and the "reduce" button is missing.
The next station has a shiny new pump but the compressor which powers it isn't turned on, and nobody seems to know where or indeed what it is.
I finally swing into one of those busy ant-heap service stations on the outskirts, with minutes to spare. A massive Lexus is completely blocking the service area. Panicking, I corner the attendant. "Quick, whose car is that? I need air now!" He yawns. "I dunno, dude," he says, picking his nose. And it's my turn to storm off, muttering insults.
Okay, so for me it just happened to be air hoses. It could be almost anything. It could be the anarcho-marxist revolutionary moving home to study accounting after seven years' squatting in Christiania. It could be the CEO who's devoted to The Smiths, despite hating them in the eighties 'cos the cooler indie kids used to snigger at his Duran Duran lunchbox. It could be the soccer mom who screams her offspring on at every local sports fixture, after a lifetime avoiding team games and all who play them.
In other words, we become our opposites. We grow into what we used to hate – or worse, what we used to laugh at. Time takes us and twists us and turns us inside-out.
Watching my car skidding comically off the alignment test thingummy in the NCT centre, I suddenly knew how Angry Man felt, that sunny afternoon fifteen years ago.