I wish I could tell you I have a new car. I’d like to tell you that it’s gray – or blue or black or red – and cute and affordable and has low mileage. And that when I bought it, with no one’s help, I’m the one who haggled with the car salesman and never let on that I even wanted the thing.
Alas, none of the above is true.
I partially blame Kia, who in their commercials, tells me that if I have a job and $199, I could get a car. Well, I have a job. And $199. I went to Kia. And still, no car. Speaking of Kia though, Fritz called me back this morning and swears he has a bunch of good stuff in my price range – and they’re 2009s, no less. Bet a million bucks one of them is a van that may or may not have been wrecked.
I haven’t called Fritz back, mainly because when I got the chance to – after work – he was already gone for the day. The other reason is because I feel this lump in my stomach every time I think about having to start the negotiation process all over again – or maybe the lump is the BLT from Subway I had today. Wasn’t that great. Bleh.
TANGENT ALERT – When I lived in O-town, there were about four choices for lunch: Hometown Pizza, Dairy Queen, McDonald’s and Subway. I got Subway all the time and once decided to deviate from my regular order of a turkey sandwich and order a BLT, and to order said BLT over the phone – they delivered, how crazy is that? Never deviate from your usual. It can only end badly.
BLT means bacon, lettuce and tomato. No, I don’t think you’re dumb. I’ve just found that I need to explain myself sometimes, EVEN WHEN THE INGREDIENTS ARE IN THE NAME. So. I order over the phone and say, I want a BLT on white bread.
Ok. Easy enough. Then she asked me what I wanted on it – you know, a normal person would believe that meant besides the three ingredients already implied by the order of a BLT. So, I said, “just mayonnaise.”
Imagine my surprise and utter confusion when I unrolled my sandwich after it was delivered and found that it contained only bacon and mayonnaise. What. in. the. hell? I still don’t get it. I guess once you get past the B, those other two letters could mean anything, and they just didn’t want to chance getting them wrong.
“Could she mean Bacon, Lima Beans and Tabasco Sauce?”
“I don’t know, just stick with the bacon. Oh, and she just wants mayonnaise, don’t forget that.”
Yeah…
What was I talking about? Buying a car? Oh. Still haven’t. And every time I get in the Focus I sit there for a second with my eyes closed and say a little prayer that it lasts just a little longer, I just need to save a little more money. I ignore the fact that stuff keeps happening to it.
The latest? Heat’s broken. Well. I say broken, but it still kind of works, when it’s turned up to the highest level. I now blink about 80 more times a second when driving home in the cold because if I don’t, I think my contacts would dry out and fall right off of my eye.
I check Cars.com every day, hoping there’s some crazy car salesman out there who has a 2008 Kia Sportage automatic with less than 30K miles that they wanna just see if they can sell for the exact amount I can spend.
I’ve branched out and resigned myself to the fact that I may never own an SUV, at least not until I win a contest where one is the prize. I am looking at cars, a few different models, in fact, but I’m still being kind of picky.
Did I mention there are other parts of car shopping that suck? Like financing? Yeah.
So I’m basically where I was the last time I talked to you about car shopping, which is nowhere, except that I’ve found a couple more Web sites to look through.
And I’m practicing my zombie look before I go talk to anyone in person again. Be proud, Dad!
On account of... 