My Car Still Hates Me

10/17/05





I’m sure all of you were on the edges of your seats waiting for the next installment of new grievances between yours truly and his automobile. This one’s for you. As you may be aware if you’ve read my mindless rant on what’s wrong with my vehicle (Buy American, 4/6/05) my car can be delicately referred to as a whopping piece of crap. Just to recap, the interior still smells dangerously of gasoline, I still have to use towels to clean up the mess from and attempt to block the income of rain water since the driver’s side window no longer performs its main function of rolling up when I push the button. (This in particular is of concern to my since it’s getting on late October.) The car tends to overheat whenever I drive more than a few miles at a time despite my expertise in lifting the hood and confirming that it has enough of that smelly green wet stuff you pour into one of the holes (keep trying and I’ve found you’ll eventually hit the right one,) in the engine to keep that from happening. The rear windshield is still a makeshift screen of plastic and the exterior looks like something salvaged out of Mad Max…only not as nice. Also, it’s been a full two years since I had an oil change and when the car is lower than a quarter tank on gas it does this bizarre rev-fade dance that sort of seems like some tiny little man is randomly squashing on the brake. One little point for those of you autophile men out there suffering heart palpitations concerning my oil change habits; I only drive about twelve miles a week, so I’ve still got about one more year before I hit the 3000 mile mark. Yeah, yeah, 3000 miles or every three months, I know; just back off, alright?

I hate driving. Hate it. I don’t want a new car; I don’t even want this car. I don’t want a car at all, but until I learn how to bio-locate or they invent that transporter from Star Trek I’m friggin stuck with the monstrosity of internal combustion. I figure if I’m gonna hate and resent an object every time I use it I should at least not feel violated by the fact that I paid many thousands of dollars for it. The current beauty cost $400 and she’s lasted me almost three years.

I certainly wish large amounts of dihydrogen oxide didn’t fall from the sky. Except of course if that weren't to happen all the crops would wither and die and eventually we'd run out of drinking water and shrivel and die and then the skeletons would crowd the streets and the mutated humans left over from this apocalypse wouldn't be able to drive their suped-up dune buggies...what with all the bones laying around. And yes, that’s two Mad Max references in the same article. I tell you what would be a good idea, me buying a car that doesn't have eighteen little "eccentricities" such as purely decorative windshield wipers (they’ve taken to working only about 5% of the time, and in that small fraction they have a tendency to stop halfway through the sweep and just sit there on the windshield like fused thermostat needles,) and non-functioning windows. If I didn’t have those, I doubt there would be a quart of water in my floorboard and I wouldn't feel as if running the Olympic slalom with my eyes closed when driving around just hoping the rain sheets off my windshield enough for me to actually watch as oncoming traffic plows into my vehicle.



And this brings us to our current predicament. There was a monsoon of a thunderstorm here a few weeks ago and despite my brilliant plan of blocking the window with the water-repelling power of a cotton towel, the inside of my car got drenched. I mopped out the seat and door the next day, (water collects in the handle region, you see,) and started up the engine intent on driving to work. All was well and good until I got about a twentieth of a mile and something strange happened. I have electric door locks, you see, and as some of us may be aware, you can only pour water onto an electric switch for so long until she just freaks out and does something unpleasant. All of a sudden the locks started engaging and disengaging at a feverish pace as if a live army man machine gunner was living inside each door. But wait; my story gets better.

I get to work, which is thankfully only a mile away. Upon parking my 1990 Woman-Repeller I find that shutting off the car does nothing to quell the firecracker reports going off as the little locks slam up and down faster than a juiced-up porn star. I didn’t really fancy the idea of leaving my car out there all day to have its own little strange seizures and slowly drain my battery. This problem would definitely take every ounce of my mechanical skills to solve.

Ten minutes later I come to the frustrating conclusion that beating the shit out of the door with my foot was not going to solve this conundrum. A few months ago I tried to fix my own window by prying loose the panel in the door to see what I could see. What I could see turned out to be another panel not easily removed with a screwdriver or a hammer, all of the tools I had at my disposal. The point is that my laziness finally paid off, in that I hadn’t bothered to securely reattach the panel back then and that allowed me to more easily get at the switch that led to the door locks. I pulled it out of the socket and felt a ridiculous amount of pride when the frantic clicking stopped. I have yet to reattach the connection, but seeing as how the automatic locks only made a lot of noise and never locked or unlocked anything even before this debacle, I don’t see the point.

I’ll make someone a lovely husband someday.