The Instrospection Imperitive

One complaint people have about the American mentality is how introspective it is.

Because America is such an enormous country, with so many natural resources, it's understandable that the average American sometimes doesn't look far beyond their own borders. The American economy could survive based purely on a domestic market - not many countries can say that any more.

If the rest of the globe suddenly vanished, America could still continue to operate, given that it produces fuel and food in abundance (although we might have to cut back on the SUV's.)

The problem with this mentality, however, is it's inflexibility.

Take, for example, this morning. Tina and I drove out to have a look at a car we were interested in buying. A stick-shift Subaru, it drove well and seemed tidy and all we had to do to put our minds at rest was to follow the car's history to find out if it had ever been written off or involved in an accident.

Doing this is wonderfully easy. The VIN number that all American-sold cars have on their windscreen (printed on the dash, just under the glass) allows you to track every incident the car's ever been involved in - from passing it's first inspection to being involved in a fender-bender at a traffic junction.

In order to track the history, you can use an American website called CarFax.

For $29.99, you can run a background check on a car you're looking at (as many as you want for one month) and find out what the seller might not be telling you.

Well, in theory, anyway. Because I can't.

I signed up. I paid my money on my American VISA card... And CarFax threw a hissy fit because my email ended in .co.uk instead of the standard .com.

This is America, Buddy, the program was telling me. Nobody's emails end in anything other than .com. That's the American way.

So in the end, I had to use Tina's email address. Mine simply did not compute - even though it was good enough for the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration, the Bank of America and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Sometimes it's worth companies like CarFax realising that there is another world south of Texas and north of Vermont.