Lessons

These have been the longest days I've had in a very tong time. Other than six hours to sleep, and some time to shower and eat breakfast, I have been doing some form of car hunting from about 3:30pm Friday till 5:30pm Saturday. Ridiculous, I tell you.

BUT, there's a light on the horizon. I have a first and second pick, and both are good deals on nice cars. We'll see how the inspection goes.

A few things I've learned through car shopping these last few weeks:

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That's obvious, yes. But I'm a person who will drive all the way across the city anyway just to be sure.

2. If a salesman stands under cover and watches you wander around in the lot in the pouring rain and doesn't come up to you, even when you've made eye contact with him 3 or 4 times, and then when you walk over and ask him to come out and open the car for you and you find a random piece of plastic sitting on top of the engine, it's a bad sign. It's an even worse sign when you ask what it is and the sales man tells you, exasperated, "I told you it's a...." (I still don't know what it was. I couldn't understand what he said and I wasn't interested in finding out.) He started walking away with no explanation of where he was going, so my dad and I just yelled "Bye" (we had to yell, he was far away by this point) and walked away, hood up and everything. Yikes.

3. I am a second guesser. I do that all the time when I'm playing Settlers of Catan and making a trade. I make the deal to trade cards, and then invariably pull my hand away and say, "Well, actually... yeah, no, ok. Here's the cards." Apparently this translates into buying cars.

4. You have to really know what you're talking about when you're a single girl on her own in a car lot. I learned a few key questions to ask while looking intently at the running engine and cocking my head to one side as if I actually knew what I was listening for. Not that I would necessarily understand the answer to the question, but they don't have to know that!

5. When you reach under the hood to open it up and you rip off half of your very long thumbnail below where it's attatched to the skin (Yyeeeooowww!), you just have to grin and bear it, cause really, what salesman would take you seriously if you pulled the whole, "Ah! I, like, broke a nay-uhl when I opened this motor cover thing, and, like, it rillyrilly huuurts." Yeah. Not so good. My thumb actually got all swollen and really tender after that, and it throbbed for two days. Pfft, and girls are mocked when they call attention to a broken nail.

Here's hoping one of the cars I saw today works out, and I don't have to learn any more car shopping lessons for a long time!