April 16, 2002 // 6:13 p.m. // The car saga continues

As if Friday of last week and Monday weren't already long enough days...

We headed to a car sale at the LDS Church Office Building. I'm not LDS, so even walking around the square blocks consisting of the Temple, Conference Center and the Office Building itself was uncomfortable. We walked into the building, were misdirected, and finally found our way thanks to a very LDS-looking gentleman.

Only one car piqued my interest. A 1998 Dodge Intrepid. The downside: It was $7,100 and my dad didn't want to pay that much for a car. So after a test drive and a visit to my mom's work, we headed to Bountiful to check on another car I wanted, a 1995 Chrysler Sebring LXi.

The Sebring was everything I wanted. Cheap, luxurious, and the perfect car to say, "I'm something, but I'm not flaunting it." It has leather seats, wood trim and a moon roof. It does have a low ceiling, and when I sat in the passenger seat on the test drive, I felt at a loss for head room.

We had decided to buy it. We knocked the overall price down to $5,500 and we left to get a cashier's check. The salesman agreed to get a few things checked out for us (a wobbly window and loose light) while we were gone.

We came back, and as we arrived, the salesman ran out to us. "I've got bad news," he said. "we got the moon roof to close, but it's not guaranteed to close again if you open it."

My dad looked at me. The salesman looked at me. The decision was mine. Did I still want this car, or did I want to wait? All I could do was stand stiff, avoid eye contact and drink my Coke.

To be honest, I'd love to have the car with or without the moon roof. Maybe one day, I can spend the $800 it'd cost to fix it. But it'd be nice to have it for the summer.

So the fact that my dad stood there with the check in hand when they had just told him that it would cost another $800 to fix the car pissed him off. We spoke with the salesman, said it wasn't right, and eventually got a meeting with the manager.

The meeting went like this: my dad argued they had an obligation to fix the moon roof since it was advertised as working. The manager told him the sale wasn't finalized, and even if it was, it was an "as is car." My dad mounted a valiant fight, but alas, the manager wouldn't budge. He made a call to the store owner, and we then went across the lot to meet with him.

This meeting was a lot of the same, but much worse. The guy was an asshole, but he was right. When we told him he had no morals, he snapped back that he told us the car needed a replacement moon roof. When we told him this was poor business, he told us he has plenty of happy customers, and that one wouldn't matter. When we told him that the price of the moon roof repair should be thrown into the price of the check, he told us no way, he's not losing money on a car, and that he didn't get to his position by being necessarily, "fair."

What irked me about this guy was not that he wasn't willing to come down in price, but that he didn't care that he was losing this sale, as well as a sale in June when my sister gets her license. It just didn't matter.

So we left, headed all over town to find a Dodge Intrepid, found nothing decent, and as of now, I'm still sans car.

And another thing...

We're shopping for a car for my sister, not me. What we'll do is find a car that she likes, I'll drive it for the rest of the school year, and come summer, I'll buy one myself, hopefully having found a job by then.

There are no good jobs out there. It's all resume this and resume that. Either that or specialty jobs. I'll find something. My dad is sick of me having no transportation, but I haven't asked him to take me one place all week. Probably just frustrated and not thinking straight, but so am I, as there is no history class, and I'll have an extra hour free before volunteering.

A great time to have a car.

Jason

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