Monday, August 04, 2003

Rental Car A couple days ago my wife gave me a call from the road to tell me that the brakes in our 1993 Geo Prism had suddenly gone bad; they were real low and mushy and the brake light on the dashboard had gone bad. At first I didn’t think too much about it because there’s a car repair place in m neighborhood that’s really good. They’ve consistently fixed the car while I waited. And, although the Geo is ten years old, it’s only got about 62,000 miles on it. Plus, I just had the car in for a check up and they did some work on the brakes, so if the brakes were in such bad shape they’d have seen something, right? Wrong! When I took it in today, one of the brake lines was torn up or broken or something and it necessitated a whole bunch of other lines getting fixed. It was going to cost $750.00 to $850.00 to fix. Plus the guy said it would take several days to get the parts in because they generally didn’t stock them locally. I went home to tell my wife and she decided we’d spend $180.00 per week for a rental car. So that’s the most upsetting thing to me—that I’ll have a hassle driving the rental car because I’ve never driven it before and every car I haven’t driven is a big mystery to me. The gas tank opens differently and it locks differently—things that other people can figure out but I can’t because mechanically I’m a moron. So that’s what I’m scared about today. This is a variation of the “mechanically incompetent” theme you see in my work. I can’t get away from it. 9:40:40 AM