Used…er, pre-owned…car blues

June 30, 2006

How do you trust someone you’ve never met? How do you make the decision to part with a chunk of money when you know the risk involved is so high, so incredibly unknown – so horribly uncertain?

How can people enjoy buying a used car?

For real! I don’t understand it. Some people get a rush from haggling, wheeling, and dealing. Kerrie, for instance, took the bull by the horns yesterday and talked the prospective price of a new Subaru down in an effort to save us money, if we decide to go that route, while I sat and watched it all go down.

I’m utterly useless when it comes to car buying. The only things I have to offer are a general distrust towards salespeople and a general distrust towards used cars. I just can’t wrap my mind around this, right now. And the worst part is, I’m going to be dealing with it for a few more weeks.

By nature, I’m not a confrontational person. I’m one of the people who, as they travel along life’s path, avoid every pothole – every breakdown and pebble and inconsistency, as well – in the road. I steer clear of anything that brings me face to face with a difficult decision. I prefer things safe. I prefer things easy. Without risk.

With the unknowns outweighing any conceivable positives, it’s difficult for me to consider a used car without flashing back to the number of cars I drove while growing up. My father had an innate ability to find vehicles that would last three months – just long enough to get me to college and back a few times with a fill-up of oil on every trip. I don’t trust strangers, especially when it comes to my money. I don’t trust strange cars either.

Regardless of our options – we could buy from family (a one-owner car with lots of highway miles and no hidden history) or we could save some money and get a reliable Subaru from a private party or used car dealership – I will always be wary of a used car’s prospects. I hate not knowing when problems could arise – our car lasted 94,000 miles, what can I expect out of a car with 150,000?

Maybe, more importantly: why can’t I just let go and allow myself to be comfortable in shopping for a used piece of machinery? I know why. It’s a distrust for anything that I haven’t been in control of for it’s entire existence, at least in terms of something that could end up costing $8000. If I were a gambling man, I’d probably have no problem with it. But I do.

I’m glad Kerrie can give some semblance of knowing what she’s doing. It’s going to help – we’ll go a long way with that. I trust her opinion and decision, and her mother has been a good help as well. Of course, we could just scrap it all and try to get by with carpooling.

Yeah, right. You’ve never had to ride to work with me in the morning.

Tags: Vilhauer |

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A quick thought on negative motivation

June 28, 2006

I’m not sure if there’s anything more frustrating than having an unfinished job staring me in the face even though I have no notion, no want whatsoever, of picking up where I left off and continuing on. It’s just not going to happen, no matter what I do. It will sit until I’m either so annoyed that I have to do it to calm my nerves or I feel so guilty that I end up doing it to spite myself.

Procrastination, I’d call it. But it’s always solitary to one specific job. We worked our asses off to get the main level clean. The dormer and basement are all that’s left. Each would take an hour if we set our minds to finishing them, to cleaning them up in preparation for the next step of the grand remodeling game. But we don’t. Instead, we stare at it, dumbed into a stupor, unable to blink for fear it will get messier, yet too unmotivated to get up and get at it.

I’ve suffered from this all of my life. I will be extremely anal about the most minute things, yet I will leave something else undone for months at a time. Ask my old roommates. Cleaning and picking up the living room? Every day! Taking my pizza box down to the garbage? Feh, leave it there.

This is common, right?

Does anyone want to come clean a house?

Tags: On... |

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Eric, back again.

June 27, 2006

Jeez.

Well, Eric is back. He’s not just lurking around the boards. He’s no longer rocking and staying put with his MySpace page. He’s back, for a second time, on blogspot — This Is Fucking Bullshit, his mostly-sports blog about, well, mostly sports.

Here’s a subject for his first post: why is there a show with Jai and Eric in Sioux Falls — finally, after months of pestering — and I’m out of town for it? How does that work?

Welcome back to the blogosphere, Eric. Hopefully you’ll last longer than a month.

If not, then (sorry, Mom) THAT’s fucking bullshit. (insert proper emoticon here)

Tags: Blogging, Friends |

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F.O.R.D.

June 25, 2006

Remember that short time in your life – and I’m talking to those of you that participated in the young love of cars – when you felt as if you needed to take sides in the most ridiculous brand battle of all time? Chevrolet vs. Ford. Remember all of those “hilarious” Ford vs. Chevy jokes from your childhood? Remember how you swore that Chevys were better than Fords, or that Fords were better than Chevys? Anyone who knew anything about cars were forced to choose between Ford or Chevy, like some arbitrary decision about your favorite domestic car maker was going to really change your life in some positive way, like we were going to be rewarded for our devoted support with a brand new car of our choice. And of course, our choice would be Chevrolet. Or Ford. It all depends.

With my friends, at least those of us who collected Micro Machines, Chevy was always the king – the King of Trucks, even – and Ford pulled behind in second, sometimes challenging even for second place with the new kid on the block – Lee Iacocca’s Dodge/Chrysler. For me, the decision was easy: I made my choice because my dad hated Ford. He had one, and it wasn’t any good, and therefore, I was a Chevy kid. Easy as that. Case closed.

Thankfully, this didn’t last long. Eventually, any child not destined to be in love with NASCAR and Super Sprints grows out of the “favorite car maker” phase. They put the long standing fight to rest and resolve themselves to liking some random company – Volkswagen, or Honda, or whoever happens to have the best advertising at the time. You learn to respect reliability, and safety, and cool factor, and the feud between Chevy and Ford is as silly as anything because, well, you wouldn’t be stupid enough to buy a car made in the United States anyway.

There’s a reason this all comes to mind. Our car – our beloved Ford Contour, Kerrie’s college car and our current “beater” – finally decided to make its way towards that big salvage yard in the sky. After years of reliable, yet shaky, service, our secondary car took the steps necessary to becoming a pile of scrap metal.

What happened is this: I noticed Thursday that the air conditioning wasn’t working. I looked at the temperature gauge and noticed that it was in the red. This couldn’t be good.

It wasn’t. After cooling it down, I took it to our garage, where I was told that – surprise! – the head gaskets needed replacing ($1700) or the heads themselves needed to be replaced ($3000!), two options we didn’t necessarily want to take. Let’s put it this way. This 1996 Ford Contour sells for $2900, according to Kelly Blue Book, in excellent conditions. Our Contour? Less than excellent. Not horrible. But definitely not excellent. Oh, and a trade in? Probably only $700-1000, depending on your classification.

In other words, it was going to cost way too much to get way to little back. And to us, that means our car is dead.

It’s actually very sad. This Ford Contour was our only form of transportation from 1997 to 2002, when we moved to Sioux Falls. It took us to Minneapolis, to Madison, to Sioux Falls and back to St. Cloud. It moved my stuff numerous times. It was as part of our family as our dog. That car took us a long way.

Well, not long enough, I guess. 92,000 miles is all. And for that, I am proud to say that I’m not much of a Ford fan. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve gotten a lot of use out of the Contour. But with the problems we had regarding Ford’s customer service a few years ago, and now this – something that probably isn’t even Ford’s fault – I find I’ve come full circle, from hating Fords for the hell of it, with a child’s grasp on the realities of automobile life, to simply being annoyed with the company as a whole.

Now, I’m not delving into pure hate, but I am a little disappointed. We didn’t drive it that hard. We should have gotten more out of this car. It was supposed to last us until our current car loan was finished. It really let us down. I’m disappointed in Ford. I’m disappointed in this Contour.

But really, there’s nothing we can do about it. It was old – over 10 years old – and now we have a chance to upgrade. We need to look back on our time with this car and think of it fondly, with a solitary tear welling up and a sweet violin crescendo playing in the background.

Ford. Found On Road Dead.

My father would be so proud.

Tags: Vilhauer |