Sticky Beak
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The Skinny
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...life in small Northern towns, working for assholes, boys who refuse to become men, synthetic personalities, anorexic models and their link to emotional scarring, bad marijuana trips, crazies on BC Transit, beer, piece of shit cars, living out of a suitcase paycheck to paycheck, unrequited love, Seinfeld, minimum-wage jobs, broken New Year�s resolutions, and over-limit Visa accounts.
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Piece of Shit Car... (it's a piece of shit...) It LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVVEEEEEESSSS!!! Yeah, I'm still here. I have the square root of S.F.A. to report, but thought it best to check in and say hello to my two fans out there. Hello Luba. Hello Pharmasave. So. Here we are again. Me, myself and I together with our closest, dearest friend... the laptop. What a sad existence I lead. Ah, well. How about a piece-of-shit-car update? Can't remember how much I've shared with you, but let's see... basically, I found the car in the online buy and sell, and bought it sight unseen after asking the bloke who sold it to me a couple of very basic questions.
This is the extent of my car-buying expertise, and the nature of my very artful negotiation and purchasing scheme. Based on the summation of the vendor's character (which I gathered over the phone in a matter of mere minutes in conversation), I took a leap of faith, offered the guy $250 more than he was asking because he told me someone else was offering $200 over (can you believe I fell for that???), and became the (not-so) proud owner of a 1990 Ford Escort Wagon. The first thing he tells me after I've handed him the money upon picking up the car is, "Oh, and the windshield wipers only work on high." And I said... Pardon? What the...??? Wasn't that in the THREE fecking questions I asked? And for the record, "high speed" translates into "warp speed". Excellent. Of course, it pisses 9 months of the year here in Vancouver, so this is definitely a bonus feature. About a week after purchasing the car, I had to get into the back seat to retrieve something and ... wait a minute... sniff, sniff... what's that smell? Oh bollocks. Cat Piss. Warp-speed windshield wipers - CHECK. Surely this is it. No, no, young grasshopper. No, no. Last weekend we had a nice three-day stretch of torrential downpours. On day two I was off to visit Naked Pam in the depths of Slurrey and hopped into the torpedo to find the passenger floorboard floating in water. Not a bit damp... not even saturated, but FLOATING. That's a bad leak. Awesome. Insert melt-down. It's ok... not a big deal. Only esthetic, not vital to the safety and overall mechanical condition of the car, so it's no problem. I can deal with a leak... a bit of mold... the smell of nasty, rotting gym socks.... This was the left (aka 'sane') part of my brain trying to convince me that the car was FINE and would still get me from A to B, and it was doing a heck of a job presenting a winning argument when... CREEAAAK, GRIND, SNAP, POP! goes something underneath my feet when I press on the brake and/or turn slowly. Hmmmm. I don't know for certain what it is, being that I'm not a mechanic, but going on sounds alone, I'm betting on a busted axle. Out the window goes the 'A to B & Safe/Mechanically sound vehicle' argument. For $1,250 you don't expect a porsche, but I also don't expect to get only 200km out of it before the whole thing goes tits-up. Bollocks. BOLLOCKS I SAY!!! Ugly. Unsafe. Unreliable. Usually you can get by with two of these factors, but even I haven't gone for all three before. Until now. Well! I reckon we'll see how it all pans out soon enough. I keep waiting for one of my tires to pass me on the highway, or for the axle to snap and my whole front end to collapse onto the pavement at 90kph. So that's your piece-of-shit car update for today. But now it's late and I must retire to get some MUCH needed beauty sleep or - god forbid - I might get nominated for another makeover show... :) |