Any Colour, So Long as it's Black

I nipped into Kwik Fit for a tracking job and was lured by a carpet display that promised every shade under the sun. Beige, grey, taupe, something that looked suspiciously like wet Labrador. A veritable rainbow of options. You could practically taste the choice.

So I scan the QR code, like a dutiful modern motorist, and tap in the registration and postcode. Up pops the grand total of my personalised, tailored, luxury options.

Black.

Just black.

It was like watching a conjuror whip the cloth off a banquet table only to reveal a single Pot Noodle. And the thing is, my 1993 Mercedes 500SL left the factory in beige. The leather is beige. The carpets were beige. The whole interior is a stately procession of beige. You could lose a digestive biscuit in there and never see it again.

But Kwik Fit’s mystical database had other ideas. In its mind, the R129 clearly only ever came in one interior: coal mine chic. Never mind the actual car. Never mind the colour samples literally hanging on a hook ten inches from their till. The computer had spoken.

It was Henry Ford all over again. Any colour you like, so long as it’s black.

You can almost picture the programmer, somewhere in a distant office, deciding that every Mercedes built before the millennium must have been upholstered in the same shade as a Victorian funeral.

The absurdity, of course, is that the beige I wanted was sitting right there on the sample board. I held it in my hands. I could feel the beige. I could commune with the beige. But ask the QR code, and suddenly I’m only allowed to order something that looks like a bin liner with stitching.

The truth is simple. The car knows it is beige. I know it is beige. The sample board knows it is beige. Everyone knows it is beige except the one thing that claims to know what I need.

The system.

And so the only way to get what the car actually came with is to march up to the counter, point at the colour I want and inform them that my SL did not, in fact, roll out of Sindelfingen as a small obsidian cavern on wheels.

In short, the computer says no, but the carpet says yes.

Beige forever. Black only when you’re Henry Ford.