Buying a car

I had a feeling when Jeff woke up Monday morning that we would be buying a car that day. His trusty Saturn let him down Sunday when he was running late for a gig, and that was the last straw for the hapless vehicle. When I casually mentioned Monday morning that Labor Day was a good time to buy a car (what was I thinking?), Jeff's eyes lit up.

He ran outside and immediately began cleaning out the Saturn.

Should I be offended that it took him six weeks to decide to date me and dog knows how long to ask me to marry him from the moment the idea first flitted across his mind, but a simple "They have good deals on Labor Day" was all it took to get him to sign over big bucks for five years?

Jeff is a slow decision maker. Which makes me think that though he talked about seeing this relationship with the Saturn through to the bitter end, he'd already been eyeing other cars.

Fiona, of course, was totally psyched. She asked for a Rolls at first but seemed content enough to accompany us instead to the Toyota dealership. She was excited to sit in all the cars and ride around as Jeff and I drove several, taking in the new car smell and making faces at our driving skills. For the first hour or two, she was in heaven.

I remember loving car shopping, too, when I was a kid, but I have a feeling the process was a little simpler back then. We were a VW family, and the dealership sold only VWs. And I have no recollection of the actual purchasing process, so it can't have been the hours-long, paper-signing ordeal that we all went through Monday. Fiona patiently tried to entertain herself while we waited and signed, waited and signed.

Part of the agony of the process is, for me, the time that it takes. This time becomes longer each time I buy a car. Monday's excursion lasted about five hours--at one dealership only. Of course, we had to drive three different cars. And we had to listen to why each of them was an excellent choice for us. Each car was the best damn car ever made. Then we had to listen to the warranty manager tell us that the car we picked just might be the worst car ever made and how we'd better get all kinds of treatments and warranties and roadside assistance because that piece of shit was bound to break down, so we'd better cover our butts. We patiently withstood the subtle sneer when we refused this posterior protection and the warranty manager wrote on our application "No Adds." It might as well have been "Communists." "Kitty Torturers." "Fucking Cheapskates."

But now it's all over, and Jeff has a well-deserved, shiny red Toyota Corolla. And I'm a teeny bit jealous. I replaced my car in January and liked being the one with the pretty new car. Now it's passe, and I'm just a schlub in an 8-month-old Subaru.

I'm not going to draw any analogies between the way Jeff car shops and the way he shops for women. His woman-shopping days, after all, are over. But I wonder where I went wrong. Was my salesmanship sub-par? Was my lifetime warranty somehow insufficient? I don't know--perhaps he examined the report of past incidents.