car update

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/AtqJvhB

ok so i bought a subaru forester. now that i’ve bought one i see them everywhere. everyone is driving these cars.

i managed to find one that didn’t have a power liftgate. which means it also, for some reason, doesn’t have rear cross traffic alerts. but like. i never had those before so i don’t super miss them. i just think it’s wild that they bundled that with such an obnoxious feature.

It also has lane departure warnings and there’s a super easy button you press to turn them off except it’s not a physical toggle button so you press it and can’t tell if it worked or not, and every time you turn the car off it re-sets to be on, so you don’t realize the super distracting warning you hate is on until it goes off and super distracts you a lot and then in the midst of a tricky driving situation you’re mashing the button to turn it off only you can’t look so you’re not sure if you missed it so you press it again and then it goes off later and you think you must’ve hit it twice so the next time you risk death to look at it and very carefully press it just once so it’s definitely off this time, and then it goes off again later anyway, and anyway you give up on using the button and just grit your teeth because the thing is constantly beeping at you because it can’t see the lane edges and freaks out. it is a useless feature, i have never once strayed from a lane and not known i was doing it, and if I were then a beep would not fix this. i want to find the wire that controls it and CUT IT but you of course cannot do that.

Anyway. As things go, not so bad really. I’ve been preoccupied with getting organizers and things and setting up the car interior to be nice, because I know from experience that one trip across the state where I’m having to half-unload and store things in there and shift everything out to make room for a thing and then load my life back into it, will mean that everything in the car is chaos and then I can’t find the emergency equipment I know I have. I had a folding shovel in the Crosstrek, I bought it when the car was new, and was storing it in the rear driver’s side footwell, and then when I needed it, well there was so much random bullshit in that car that I couldn’t find it, and in fact I never found it, I sold the car without ever having found that folding shovel. So I bought a new one for this car, and I am sewing a seat-back organizer for the driver’s seat, into which all of those things will go and then I will never remove them because I will not remove that seat back organizer because even if I have unexpected passengers or cargo surely a seat back organizer can be left in place.

This is my hope, anyway. We’ll see. I’m finding myself without time to actually finish sewing the thing because shit keeps coming up. I thought it would take longer to get the car but no it just took up all of two days, and I have so much else to do around my house that I don’t have time for anything else, so it’s just as well I’d arranged to be off work this week too because I haven’t had a moment to myself yet and probably won’t at this rate but hopefully I can at least get my car set up.

I got the Most Boring Color; here’s hoping I don’t lose my nerve and do manage to find some artwork to have vinyl-wrapped onto the hood.

Suggestions welcome. Who could I commission, to do a fantasy-airbrush-style piece in wild colors? I want like a cool dragon or something, I really don’t know beyond that. Probably the dealership will tell me not to because of the automatic lane-sensing cameras and things but like if they don’t work maybe it will be time to cut the fucking wires so they stop beeping at me because they don’t know where the lane markings are. IDK.

New item by B Kelly https://href.li/?https://photos.app.goo.gl/YqUtLKwTf9qtVsG56

we’ll see if that link fuckn worked or what

yeah for some reason the thing i’m most excited about is the moon roof, which is likely going to be the thing that breaks and makes this car terrible, but at the moment in the fading glory of autumn i just love it so much for some reason.

2 things remain: 1) I asked them if i could fit a full size spare in and they consulted and waffled and hemmed and hawed and finally said yes! you can! we’ll just have to go over to the parts department and see about that! and then it was An Odyssey of multiple hours to get the car inspected (???) and registered and my insurance and whatever, and we didn’t finish until nearly an hour after the dealership had closed, and I knew if I brought up the damn tire again somebody was going to cry, maybe me, so I didn’t. but I have to call them… tomorrow now… and be like “so i was serious, also I want to discuss how to note this down in the maintenance logs so I get my rotations done five ways”. and like, to be perfectly truly genuinely honest, it’s not that I’m afraid I’ll get stuck somewhere unable to drive, it is one hundred percent that I drive this car almost exclusively distances of 300 miles or more, and what WILL happen to me is that i get a flat as I get onto the highway or, better still, after I have gone maybe a hundred miles, and I can put the donut on but you cannot do highway driving for hundreds of miles on a donut, and so I will be stuck in fucking Utica or something and have to buy four new tires from literally wherever is open at the time and it will be a shitshow and it will be ten pm on a friday or something, and i absolutely will not do this.

So what will happen is, I will buy a spare fifth tire, I will at some point destroy one of my tires, and they’ll say “ah you gotta buy four new ones” but i will say ha no i don’t, and I will put the donut back in the trunk and store the spare rim somewhere until such time as I have yet another problem and then I will say, sadly, okay now I have to buy FIVE new tires, and will re-set. (This means that yes, then I will destroy a second tire on the Thruway near Nowhere at midnight on a Sunday, that’s how it will go, but I will have put it off.)

2) I forget what 2 is. Oh yeah the fucking check from my fucking insurance. We floated the money to use as a down payment on this car, pulling it from some money we have earmarked but have not yet used for other things, and then the fucking check hasn’t arrived yet, they claim to have mailed it on the sixth. So that’s a headache. I just spent a thousand years combing through the website to see if there’s a form where I can send a message to a person to ask them– all the website says is “paid by check” but they don’t mention mailing the check, so was there something else I was supposed to have done about it?

In the meantime, I got a loan from the dealership to finance part of the car purchase and while I am un-loan-to-able because my income is so wretchedly low, I was shocked to discover that somehow my credit score is insanely high, nearly perfect. Which is obviously meaningless because nobody will loan to me anyway. And it just highlights what a fucking stupid scam credit reports are. Because I have near-perfect credit, and am un-loan-to-able. Christ what a farce. (Dude co-signed, and the moment he appeared all communications were in his name, and the dealership texted me a request to leave them a review– addressed to his name. On my phone! Which is the only contact info they have! Which is MY PHONE. It rankles! I’m going to leave them a good review but not until after I’ve calmed down about it. Come the fuck on.) (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[krait]

Congrats on the new car!!

now that i’ve bought one i see them everywhere. everyone is driving these cars.

Heehee, this happens to me every time I buy a car. (So... three times in my life thus far.) As soon as you own it, you start spotting it on every street.

OH NO and GRRR to the check shenanigans, and I hope you can get things untangled (including removing dealership heads from hind ends, because WHAT). Good luck!!