Force the Hand, Spin the Wheel

Rewind to three weeks ago...

When I listed my Ambitions for 2008, I put "new wheels" down because I was already in the process of replacing my 10-year-old and increasingly beat-up Cavalier.

In the meantime, three Thursdays ago I headed to Voorhees to attend a job fair. This, by itself, ended up being a colossal waste of time. It may have been the smallest job fair ever, with exactly seven companies represented, all of which were looking for people to fill sales positions. If there's one thing I absolutely cannot do, it's convince people to buy anything. I couldn't proverbially sell refrigerators to Eskimos (who actually use them to keep food from freezing.)

So after that farce, I headed home. By now it was freezing cold and raining quite hard, with the roads getting wet and the rain starting to turn into snow. I was going to make a stop to get some random incidentals. I made a left turn to go into the strip mall's parking lot.

I never made it.

"Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast!"

Five seconds later, I've got an airbag in my face and a curb literally up in my car's grill. The smoke that accompanies the airbag's deployment is one of the worst smells in the world, by the way. You're never prepared when something like that happens. You can't react afterwards; you just have to collect yourself. So I called 911 and a tow truck (getting disconnected from the 911 call before it ended), got out, and assessed the damage, thinking to myself the whole time, "This could be it for this car."

I got towed to a nearby body shop with the same thought running through my head. By this time, the rain's completely changed over to snow and I'm hearing reports of little accidents all over the area on the radio. When we got there, I called the insurance company, which always leads to a bit of confusion since I have to give them my name for everything. The reason for that is that I bought that car when I was still working part-time in Trenton, and my parents put it on their insurance policy to save everyone some money because it's common knowledge that males under 25 get hosed on car insurance rates.

This was a curious sight in the office:

So Enterprise picked me up and we headed over there to get a rental car, as mine was undriveable due to the airbags launching. Their office had an Easy button, too. Turns out you can actually buy them, and it says "That was easy!" when you press it. Neither of them worked, though.

I ended up renting a Taurus and immediately ended up regretting it. It's a big car that feels and drives like a big car, and I've never been comfortable driving large vehicles. Additionally, driving down the Atlantic City Expressway in rush-hour traffic during a snowstorm may be the worst possible circumstances to drive an unfamiliar car under. But I got home in one piece.

I called Mom to tell her what happened (again, insurance) and she had the same thought I did - that this might be the end for my car. The insurance company covered most of the rental cost. Now I had to find a new car.

It's been 10 years since I'd had to do this, and the very medium you're using to read this account right now was basically how I did all my research. Seriously, folks, there's no real reason to visit a dealership until you're ready to take a test drive. Hell, most every dealer these days has not only a Web site, but either a guy or an entire department devoted to handing online inquiries.

But what to buy? Well, non-ballas like myself drive automatics and prize durability, efficiency, and functionality over something that's obviously overcompensating for a personal deficiency of some kind. This does not mean that it can look like Legos on wheels, though.

One thing I started doing that I'd never really done before was pay attention to what kinds of cars I'm surrounded by regularly in my parking lots here and at the office. I have a surprisingly large number of Nissan-driving neighbors. Chevrolet doesn't make the Cavalier anymore; the new equivalent is something called the "Cobalt" which may or may not be strictly a manual. I'd considered the Camry, Saturn, Malibu and Sonata, but none of them made the final cut.


I didn't want to get an Accord at first because "everyone has an Accord." Well, you know what, genius? There's a reason for that. It came down to this and the Jetta, and while there wasn't really anything wrong with the Jetta, when I test-drove the Accord, it felt right. I don't just mean that while it's bigger than my old car, it felt like a smaller car and not like I was towing something like the rented Taurus. It just felt right.

You know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I had planned on picking it up on Friday, but the salesman I had originally dealt with wasn't there, throwing me out of my comfort zone. So I ended up going in Saturday morning (I haven't mentioned all the sleep I've not gotten over the last month because of this) and we were able to take care of the insurance stuff over the phone (the benefits of being with the same company for over 25 years).

So that's that. Life's somewhat back to normal, I've got a new car that I like, and one of my yearly ambitions has been met for the first time in a long time. We now return you to your regularly scheduled post-Super Bowl content.

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