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Car Wars
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 02:44PM 
Car issues. Don't you love them? Shopping for cars, buying cars, financing cars, insuring cars, fueling cars, driving cars. Once that is accomplished, hoping no one will pull out in front of (or run into the back or side of) your car. Providing routine service for your car. Troubleshooting mechanical or electrical problems with your car. Repairing and maintaining your car. Keeping your car reasonably clean on the interior and free of scratches, dings, dents, and avian offerings of the disgusting sort on the exterior.
More fun than a barrel of monkeys hopped up on intravenous energy drinks, just back from a field trip to Reptile World.
For the last two days we denizens of Chez Weber have been in the throes of various and sundry car issues. So many in fact that I may have to make this into two posts.
Plus which, other things are bothering me which you know I'm going to lay on you sooner or later.
We were capable of making a decision without having our arms twisted behind our backs until we hollered "Uncle" so loudly that it could be heard over the mountains and past the bubbling hissing grease of the funnel cake cookers at Dollywood.
First off, Erica needs a new car. By that I really mean, a different car. She has been driving my old Park Avenue for nearly two years and it's circling the drain. Well, to be honest, all but a wisp of tire tread and perhaps half a center cap is already down the drain. It's a '98 that was a real creampuff in its day but you might say it has been rode hard and put up wet a few times too many. Its day is gone with the wind, y'all.
So Andrew and TG have been "helping" the little Boo by taking her around to various car dealerships and making fun of her whenever she opens her mouth. "I like that one," she'll say with characteristic diffidence, pointing to a pre-owned compact automobile hovering in the vicinity of her price range. The salesman, following along behind, will register hopefulness in his anxious beady eyes. "HAHA, that one is so lame," Andrew will scoff. The salesman will become crestfallen and his antiperspirant will let him down like cement bedroom slippers.
(It doesn't help that we're in the midst of a heat wave that makes molten lava seem like soft-serve ice cream by comparison.)
"Look at this here, Erica," Andrew will suggest, gesturing toward one of eighteen million cars shimmering in the fiery late-day sun. She will cast a baleful look where he points and shake her head. "I don't want to drive a Saturn Ion." (No offense but I don't blame her.)
TG will look on, silent, until he spots a '99 Mustang with 96,000 miles on the odometer and tries to talk her into test driving it. Forgive me if this comes across as judgmental but the word "vicarious" occurs to one.
Suffice it to say we have had difficulty reaching a consensus regarding the amount of money Erica should pay for a car, whether said vehicle should be new or used, if it should be purchased from a private owner or from a dealership, how many miles we will tolerate on the odometer of a pre-owned automobile, whether to be a stickler on the existence of a warranty, et cetera.
If kicking the tires were an Olympic sport, we'd all be huddled on the victory dais, holding aloft our golden discs, wiping tears of patriotism away as they played our National Anthem.
It isn't any help that somehow an acquaintance who is a car salesman in East Tennessee got involved (I won't say how but TG in a weak moment might have dialed his number), because Erica's old car is in fact so far gone that it is still in East Tennessee where she left it after college. It wouldn't make it over the mountains! So if she's going to use it as a trade-in, it would be easier if she bought her new car there rather than here. Luckily East Tennessee is where her boyfriend lives and she's not averse to making the trip.
And yes, in our family we always try to do things the hard way!
Faster than lightning dipped in buttery-flavor Crisco, the car salesman had "found" the single car on Planet Earth that was "just made" for Erica. Problem is, it happens to be brand-new and the sticker price is at least fifty percent more than I, at least, had envisioned her paying for a car.
The car salesman called yesterday, demonstrating that maddening combination of ebullience and sangfroid unique to persons employed in the automobile sales industry, to inform me that he had gone ahead and taken the liberty of securing financing for Erica and had plastered a "Sold" sign on the car (which she has yet to lay eyes upon, much less drive, for obvious reasons) and that she was now officially "good to go." It required me at my most kind (I hope) but firm (I know) to let him down semi-gently.
See, I told him, not only am I totally unconvinced that Erica should invest in a brand new car, and completely against her paying as much as that particular car costs no matter what she decides to do, and after all we are still in the preliminary stages of this whole thing, but no way is Erica going to commit to buying a car she has never seen or driven. And I thought but did not say, no way am I going to hand over a sale that easily even if Erica has been walking five miles to work and ten miles back on bloody stumps where her legs used to be, and you have thoughtfully reserved the last car in Christendom that has four inflated tires and a working engine and are even now fighting off hordes of desperately eager cash-abundant car buyers with naught but a chair and a whip, Erica's name valiantly on your lips.
I can be stubborn that way.
He didn't like it when I said that and in fact made the mistake of becoming a tad fractious. "Well, you haven't bought a car until you've signed the papers, you know," he attempted to enlighten me.
There was plenty of pristine grass in the field and he just had to step there.
I assured our car salesman acquaintance that I was familiar with the process of purchasing an automobile, having been subjected to that particular hybrid of joy and sorrow many times in my life, and that we were capable of making a decision without having our arms twisted behind our backs until we hollered "Uncle" so loudly that it could be heard over the mountains and past the bubbling hissing grease of the funnel cake cookers at Dollywood.
I may not have said it in exactly those words but I'm pretty sure he got the message. I can be vivid in my speech and one of my many mantras happens to be "Plain Talk Is Easily Understood."
He backed out of the phone conversation with his hackles somewhat elevated, his tone loosely draped in a gauzy-thin veil of contempt and pity, smoothly switching from hard-sell mode to quasi-wounded But-I-Was-Only-Trying-To-Help-You mode as he went.
Yeah buddyroe ... I'm also familiar with the push-pull, passive-aggressive method of creative salesmanship, having deftly employed it myownself a time or four. Let's move on.
Got to go bandage the stumps where poor Erica's pretty legs used to be. Later y'all.
