|
|
|
negocios para un auto
Tuesday, October 11 2011
It was another unseasonably warm day, and it began early with Gretchen and me out in the parking area scraping bumper stickers off our old 1998 Honda Civic, which Gretchen wanted to photograph so she could try to sell it on Ebay. Gretchen is uncommonly committed to the propaganda value of bumper stickers, but I find them ugly and distracting. My guess is that every additional bumper sticker dilutes the propaganda value of the others in direct logrithmic proportion to the number of existing stickers. A single sticker might shout loudly and clearly, but five or six (the number on our Honda Civic) don't parse. As we worked at eliminating the stickers, Gretchen seemed to be coming around to my view. At one point I joked, "I really hate the person who put these on here!" In the end, the best way to get them off was to use a wide drywall knife and a rag soaked with paint thinner. We scratched the car a few times, though the car was plenty scratched up already.
Gretchen listed our old car for $950 on Craigslist, and within an hour she'd received 20 emails about it. She ended up telling someone he could have it if he showed up with $1000, though perhaps we should have let the bidding war continue.
The guy who wanted to buy the car was about an hour away, so I quickly began cleaning it out. It's amazing how much crap we had in that thing, which we've been using continuously since September, 2002. Most of it took the form of cloth grocery bags, although there were many other things including one of Gretchen's old drivers licenses, a spork, an ice pick, enough tools to do a roadside brake job, and stray bits of Lego dating back to the previous owner. There was also a good deal of grime and dirt: cat hair, dog hair, at least a cup's worth of visibly-moldy spilled cat litter, and detritus from salvaged wood: sawdust, pieces of bark, clumps of lichens, and twigs.
I was all by myself when the guy and his people arrived to look at the car. Gretchen had thought maybe he'd be coming with a tow truck, but no, it was just three young adults in a nice new car. We knew already that Spanish was the buyer's first language, and when Eleanor came running out to bark at them, their panicked reaction seemed a bit more urban than one normally sees in these parts. The buyer dude was sharply dressed and had one of those douchey quarter-inch-wide strap-shaped beards that I'd assumed had already fallen out of fashion. In my shorts and bare feet, I guess I looked younger than my years, because he asked if the person he'd been talking to had been my "mom." "No, that was my wife." He then tried to pull a slick move by asking what was the best price I could give him. Then he offered me $700. This irritated me, because Gretchen had agreed to the $1000 price to encourage him to come out and pick the car up immediately. "No," I said, "I have to sell it for $1000 or my wife is going to kill me." He complained that it had been listed for $950, and I replied that 20 people were lined up behind him and would probably pay more. "But I'm here and they're not," he argued. I retreated to the henpecked husband excuse and when he offered to call her, I said that was impossible because she works in a prison. He seemed to understand a bit better than most people why this placed her within a communication dead zone. So he caved and had his companion give me a fat stack of fifty twenty dollar bills. But he was perfectly friendly after our negocios concluded, asking me to call him if I ever wanted to sell the 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid (yeah right). His girlfriend (she was muy caliente), who now felt safe enough to leave their car, asked me all the usual questions about Eleanor: how old is she, what kind is she, and did she have puppies.
The buyer had looked under the hood and checked the trunk but had bought the car without ever starting it up. Within minutes it had dealer plates and was driving out of our driveway. Confused by their navigation system, which had tried to send them down Hurley Mountain Road (where a bridge is still out), they headed north up Dug Hill Road, presumably out to Route 28.
There were a few minor details in need of fixing in our new Civic Hybrid. One of these was a cable that stuck out whenever you closed the trunk; I fixed that with hot glue. There were also a couple blown fuses rendering the lighter outlets inoperable (though of course fuses for our old Honda Civic are incompatible). But most galling of all were the little scratches on the Navigation DVD. Last night I'd tried making a copy or even just an image of it but had had no luck because of little scratches. So today I tried buffing them out, first with toothpaste, and when that didn't work, a layer of Brasso between the scratched surface and the surface of a dead CD. But that technique proved to be a disaster, leaving a bunch of unexpected gauges that required fine sandpaper to remove. But once you've gone down that road, polishing is suddenly a big time-consuming ordeal. I tried to automate this by turning the DVD on an old CD drive spindle motor and draping a Brasso-soaked coth over it, but this didn't accomplish much (mostly because the spindle motor was too wimpy). So I gave up, for the time being, and redoubled my search for a torrent of the appropriate DVD. It turns out that there are such .iso files (one is called Honda_Navigation_DVD_6.62A_Update.6070672.TPB.torrent), though it looks like successfully burning them to a DVD can be a hassle. And of course Honda chose to use entirely proprietary hardware, so there's no easy way to substitute in a thumb drive (a much saner form of automotive data medium) for its on board DVD. Consider this story a signature on a petition for someone to build an open source car.
In the afternoon I drove the new car into Uptown Kingston and registered it, getting new plates (which, in New York, have gone from dark blue on white to dark blue on orange). I could have transferred the plates, but that would have required me to register it in both of our names, and Gretchen didn't want to have to drag herself to the DMV too. Because of this, there's no sense in New York for a married couple to ever register a car in both names.
Because David had sold us the car so cheaply, it fell prey to a part of the New York vehicle code stipulating that newer cars have to be taxed at their bluebook value, which for this car was over $10,000 (remember, we'd only paid $6800 for it). We could fill out a form and have David (or, actually, David's Republican father) state that the car was a gift, but in the end Gretchen and I decided that that was just too sketchy.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111011 feedback
previous | next |
