What Colour is Your Car?

A small aspect of my job is to obtain the license plate number, colour and make of guests' vehicles as they check in.  We do this so that when a rogue car is found to be blocking in another three we can locate the owner and ever so politely ask them to shift it.  But you'd be surprised how hard a task this can be and I'm often met with blank stares and exasperated looks.  I understand that you might not know your licence plate number - I don't know mine - but you can't just make it up.  You do have to step outside and get it for me.  And you think that would be the head scratcher; trying to remember your licence plate number.  But it's not.  The biggest hurdle most people seem to trip up on is the colour of their vehicle.  The colour.  This continues to baffle me.  How hard is it to remember the colour of your car.  But people try to over complicate things.  The colour of my car?  Well, I suppose you'd say it was kind of a graphite colour.  No, more of a charcoal actually.  So your car is grey.  Next!  My car?  My car is a deep burgundy.  Your car is red.  Moving on!  Ummm, ummm, errr, well, ummmm, I guess it's a sort of champagne, I don't know... Let me stop you there.  Your car is gold.  Who kick started this craze of creating pretentious names to describe the colour of a car.  It's just madness.  And why do people feel they have to give me the accurate description of the car based on what the salesman told them.  I don't care.  I just want to know if it's black, silver, red, blue or whatever.  And if you have to be fussy then I guess you can insist it's dark red but I'm not having any of this deep burgundy nonsense.  Honestly!  I smile at people and watch as they think carefully about their car.  You can see the cogs turning as they try to remember the colour of their vehicle.  Some people park right in front of the office where I can blatantly see their car and whilst they're umming and errring over the colour I'm staring at the thing thinking it's black.  It's black!  It's bloody black!  But try to tell them that and they almost scoff at you.  It's not black.  It's midnight dahhrling.  Of course it is.  You have to humour these people.  Even though it's probably obvious from my typing that after a detailed description of the deep burgundy car that has been likened to a good Merlot I've just typed red.  R.E.D.  Red.  After a long day of check ins I get to the stage when I just dread asking the question.  And the colour and make of your vehicle please?  It makes me shudder.  I'm grateful when the next guest I come to confirms they came by train.