Cars

As many of you know, I work from home. This has presented interesting challenges, odd encounters, and numerous other things that I’d rather not go into here. This update is about Cars. I bought a car shortly after I graduated from College since BTW, who had served me so faithfully lo those many years, decided to crash the transmission. Again. Well, it wasn’t really again, see the first time the transmission was acting funny. Not HAHA funny, just odd funny. Kinda like that kid in your sixth grade class that took a shower with his bathing suit AND t-shirt on. Yeah, like that kid. Not really funny, just kind of odd.

Anyway- The first time it was acting weird so I took it to the mechanic and he said he could do a $100 repair, but I would be mad at him in 3 months when the whole thing needed to be rebuilt. So, I said rebuild it. And 18,001 miles later (18,000 mile warranty, of course) it completely craps out. Like, won’t shift at all, craps out. So I have him “fix it” as cheaply as possible, sell it and buy a new car (actually buy a new car, then sell it, but who’s counting).

I love my SUV. It’s loaded. And the first year I worked for my company I put 45,000 miles on it. Now not all of those were for work since my fiancé lived in Austin and both of our parents lived in SA. From the last weekend in October until we got married in January, I went to either SA or Austin every weekend. So that could’ve had something to do with it.

But now that I work from home, I take my car out MAYBE once a week. And that’s only if we go to Home Depot to get something (unless of course we’re buying a 9 foot Christmas Tree. Why would we take it then? Where’s the challenge in that?). So I don’t really pay attention to things like gas and such. The other day, I’m driving home from a work thing (don’t ask, wasn’t pleasant) and my car beeps telling me I’m getting low on gas. And it got me thinking… What did we do before our cars yelled at us? And is it making us stupider as a country? I mean, I don’t even know if my gas gauge actually works on my car. I never look at it. Well, that’s not true. What I should say is the only time I look at it is to see which side of the car my gas tank is so I know how to pull into the pump. I only look at how many miles to E (which we all know has a 20 mile pad on it, so when it reads 0, you can still get to the “cheap” gas station).

I just was thinking that my first truck didn’t have beeping devices or “miles to E”. In fact, it didn’t have a radio or air conditioning, there’s no way they were gonna throw in something cool like miles to E or an onboard computer. I’m pretty sure Dodge didn’t know what computers were when they built the first truck. But did I pay attention to it better than I do now? Probably. And sure, I have a lot more going on now, but isn’t a vehicle that costs tens of thousands of dollars something I should be paying attention to and not waiting on the computer to tell me when it has issues?

Yes. But my that beep is comforting when I’ve forgotten.