It took me three years, but I finally have a car! And frankly it’s about time; I was starting to get tired of walking or riding the bus when I couldn’t find people to drive me to all the places that a busy guy like me needs to go. Like McDonalds. Plus I’ve found out that most of the people that ride the bus have severe brain damage, which apparently causes severe body odor. Anyway, I now own a 2001 Audi A4. I think. That’s what the car dealer told me I own. For all I know I own a cardboard box that somebody painted silver. I’m not one of those guys that knows a whole lot about cars, and car dealers intimidate me. I’m a relatively laid back guy and I try to avoid conflicts; but according to my parents I was supposed to attack these dealers as if they ate my first born child (which when you think about it is probably a favor to society).
Mother: Tell him you want the car for $300.
Me: But he’s asking for $7,500.
Mother: Well, tell him that dead hooker in the trunk takes a lot off of the resale value.
Me: What hooker?
Mother: Figure it out… *click*. (Oh, by the way, on that note Happy Mother’s Day Mom!)
So with that in mind, I began to inspect the car (and the trunk probably was very large, not that I’m implying anything). After confirming with my keen eye that the car had four wheels and a CD player (pretty much my two requirements for a car), I asked for the Carfax, just like the commercials told me to. I then proceeded to stare at a bunch of random numbers and words that made no sense to me, like “VAS system replaced,” (a sentence I don’t understand at all) and “dead raccoon removed from glove box,” (a sentence that probably did not scare me as much as it should have).
Once I had determined that the car had never been owned by anyone in North Dakota (which is huge sticking point with me), I asked for a test drive. Now, this is where things got sort of freaky. I had always assumed that the dealers went with you on the test drives, in case you did something stupid. In which case you could run away and leave the dealer to take the blame from the local police department. But apparently, this is no longer protocol. This guy just handed me the keys, and said “Have fun.”
Now, there are several reasons why this was a major problem. First off, I didn’t have anyone to ask how anything worked. Audis are foreign cars, which means that drunk/retarded people were primarily responsible for assembling them. This of course means that the headlight switch is in the glove box and the brakes are in the cup holders and there is a German dude permanently sitting in your backseat yelling something in a foreign language. So I just sat in the parking lot for about ten minutes trying to figure out how the car worked, which isn’t easy when you have some guy yelling German in your ear.
The second problem is that I’m not exactly comfortable driving in Boulder. In fact, only two people in Boulder have ever seen me actually drive a car, and that was back in Hawaii. Nobody up here thinks I even know how to drive, which is awesome because nobody ever asks you to be the designated driver. They would rather give the keys to a drunk girl than me sober. Now, back in Kona I’m a very reliable driver. But Kona has only two lanes, very few intersections, no animals big enough to cause major bumper damage, and reasonably intelligent pedestrians.
Boulder however is another story. Within five seconds I became overwhelmed by Boulder traffic just trying to get out of the parking lot. So instead of really test driving it, I drove about fifty feet down the road before turning into an abandoned cul-de-sac and idling the car. I had my parking brake on and I was still expecting some sort of animal to jump out in front of me. I mean, my neighbor doesn’t trust me driving, but even she has killed a moose (or a caribou or a walrus; it was some sort of large mammal), so these animals are all over the place. I mean, I was sitting at a bus stop the other day and I watched three deer wander lazily into the road and hold up traffic for five minutes.
But at least animals have the excuse that their brains are the size of walnuts. Some Boulder pedestrians don’t have that excuse. These people will bike and walk across the road randomly and without warning and they take forever to do it. If you try to inform them that you will run them over if they ever do that again, they get all moody and start yelling stuff like “Pedestrians always have the right of way!” Of course, I’ve always lived by my dad’s saying about right of way on the road, which is “whoever is least likely to die in the accident has the right of way.” And he is a firefighter, so he has probably seen his share of people who might have won a lawsuit had their brains not been scattered over a five mile stretch of highway, which can make it hard to hire attorneys.
Anyway, after some haggling with the dealer, I finally walked out of there with the car and drove off into the sunset. Or at least I would have, until I realized those sneaky car dealers didn’t put any gas into the car. So my first stop with my new car was a gas station, where I pulled up next to this gorgeous blonde at the pump. So, as suave and as cool as I could be, I got out of my car and realized I had no idea how to open the fuel valve. I sat in that gas station for about five minutes looking for a button before a friend called and told me that I just needed to push on the flap and it would open.
The one thing I do know about my car is that I want Firestone tires. That way, this song will always be playing whenever I drive around.
