With no particular place to go
``You must be nervous,'' my mother said. ``You're not even reading.'' It was true. My parents were driving me up to the dealership where they bought their Toyota Something in a wondrous and extensive process last year, me to give a final test-drive to the Scion tC Release Series thingy with the glossy black color and red highlights and sporty thingy things. If that proved suitable after all, then, I was going to buy it. The decision really wasn't complicated: I must have a working car; I would prefer a new one so that in the event of malfunctions I have specific people to yell at rather than plead for help from; I could afford this; and it has all the components I find important. So last night I only needed one more go-around describing the exact thought process to my parents to talk myself into it, and shortly after 9 this morning we made the drive up.
The sales person we'd talked with on Monday was available and present, and asked what I did want to do; I wanted the test drive. She maneuvered the car --- the only one they had, as the Release Series is a quite limited edition and dealerships only get a couple --- out of the showroom and let me and my mother take it without her supervision because they still had my license on file, she said. And we drove, and it felt pretty good, and ``Hotel California'' came on the radio and that seemed like I had had enough. I forget what was on before that but I remember it was something I liked. We got back and the sales woman asked what I wanted to do, and I gulped and somehow said, ``I want to buy it.''
She passed me off to another sales guy who I think we met briefly on Monday and he promised to take care of all the paperwork stuff that would be involved. However, three of the great sources of comedy and adventure when my parents bought the Something were absent here: I wasn't trading in my old car, since as a fifteen-year-old car with no transmission-type concept in it the trade-in value consists of the loose change I had in the cup holder. And even if I had there wouldn't be any remaining balance n the car to have assumed in any hypothetical new vehicle. Also, there was no squabbling over what exactly the price of the car should be since the Scions mercifully are flat, no-negotiation rates.
The new sales guy said, ``No, I won't, not at all,'' to some announcement I didn't quite notice but which from context seems to have been a call for him to meet with some particular couple because he met with them for six hours last weekend and they were never going to buy anything ever, and more, they were extremely boring. By most measures I've wasted the time of many car sales people this week, although I'd like to think that I was being quiet rather than boring. Then he found in his cubicle a couple people and another sales folk at his desk. Apparently the other sales individual was displaced similarly, and now mine would have to do paperwork in another cubicle. I wondered if the cubicle problem thing was in the same script they get the bit about never having business cards with their own names on them.
Trivia: When William Bligh and the other officers and crew set adrift in an open boat from the HMS Bounty mutiny first sighted the coast of Timor, none were strong enough to cheer, or credit that they had sailed from Tofua to Timor in forty-one days. Source: Mutiny: A History Of Naval Insurrection, Leonard F Guttridge.
Currently Reading: Extraterrestrial Civilizations, Isaac Asimov.