So I bought my first car. All by myself. A Ford Laser Sport Hatchback, 1984, I think. In bright red. With my student loan money which is probably illegal but since my year was the first year of student loans, there were no rules! And now we all still owe the government a lot of money. Except me, I just paid mine off. Goodbye retirement.
Anyway, let’s back off from the bitterness. I bought the car from a boy racer who met me at a petrol station for the exchange. I know there was paperwork involved, we both signed a napkin stating that I was buying the car for $5,000* and he was selling it and he’d left the ownership papers in the glovebox. Sort of how we do our taxes in New Zealand. Just write down on a bit of paper what you think you earned and owe and drop it off to the IRD when you feel like it. None of this, taxes must be done and posted to the IRS by April 15th or you will be killed, business.
This was a boy racer, who apparently didn’t realize that a hatchback is not really a boy racing kind of car but maybe he didn’t know because the Fast and the Furious hadn’t come out yet. And I wasn’t going to tell him, I was too busy worrying about how negotiating absolutely nothing out of the deal would be impacted by giving him comments like that. So, I ended up with a car that had Tweeters in the front** and in the back, 4 sub woofers bolted into the piece that is supposed to lift up when you open the hatch but no longer did. Meaning you could hardly slide anything into the boot (trunk) and had to go in through the back seats. I knew nothing about woofing and tweeting, I just knew my car had a heartbeat all of its own and people would turn and look when I drove along. Which is not my thing at all but I really had no clue on how to control the bass.
So, now I have my brand new car - only problem is I'm on the other side of town and I need to drive it home. And it's a manual (stick shift***). And I've never driven one before. Can't be that hard. I know when the engine starts to roar, you're supposed to change gears. I did not know about that pedally thing you're supposed to push down at the same time as you move the sticky thing. Picked that up real fast. Did not entirely master the moving smoothly through the gears piece. Not until 4 years later. I sweated a lot on that drive home. Mostly on a hill where I sat at the lights for 4 rounds with people tooting (beeping) at me, me revving the engine and trying to make it go forward and up but just going a lot of backward and down. In the end, I put on my hazard lights, took a time out and cried while the cars drove round me and gave me the finger (flipped me the bird). Eventually, I took a running leap at the hill and was up and over. Got back to my flat (apartment) and the car stayed in the driveway for 3 days. I was traumatised (traumatized).
But, I got back on the horse**** and figured it out. There was a lot of riding the clutch but that would become someone else's problem later on.
Did I mention that it had these sporty spotlights? For a while. Sometimes when you are driving in the rain and you are stopped at the lights, your foot will slip and you will be in gear and the car will hop forward into the next car. And then one of your lights will face down. And the wires will fall out. And there will be a person waiting at the bus stop, yelling "I saw it. I'll be a witness". And you can't drive over him because he is intellectually disabled and just trying to be a good citizen*****.
This car would actually be the bane of my life, through no fault of it's own. But wait, there's more. Just not today.
*I actually think this is what I paid for it which means I paid way too much, I don’t even think I negotiated at all. Which is why I now work as a negotiator and only ever use the word “no”.
**I keep wanting to write Twitters which now seems a much more common word than Tweeters. And I don’t really ever twitter my tweets much.
***I had no idea how much translating from New Zealand to American was involved when talking about cars. Apologies to my South Korean and Malaysian readers (up to 23 - what?). All I know is - bbo bbo and kentang. Neither of which has anything to do with cars unless your are kissing a potato in one.
****Which was good that I had a horse since I didn't want to drive my car.
*****But you want to. Just a little bit.
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