Day: March 30, 2011

Holy shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw this, before I filled up my tank (for the first time since Wednesday). $140.00 to fill up someone’s car? Jesus Christ. And the thing is, I think that the vehicle being filled still wasn’t at full capacity, because of the unlikely event that the car was able to hit approximately $140.00 even on the pump. But no matter, $140.00 is ridiculous. I balked at the notion that filling my new car still encroached into the $40.00 territory, solely based on the asinine price of gas in the first place, but to stamp a Benjamin on top of that, I might as well just kill myself if that were my fate, because there’s no way I’d be able to sustain such fuel costs with how much I’m required to drive in the first place.

To put it in perspective, I’m going to assume that the vehicle is obviously in the class of a Ford Excursion, or super-crew Chevy Silverado, or something along those lines, based on the 35+ gallon fuel capacity. On a good day, these guys are averaging anywhere from 15-17 mpgs, so they’re getting anywhere from 540-600 miles on a tank of gas. Based on where I was filling up from, and the notion that most people work out in the city of Atlanta, or at least from where I was, not there, so I’m going to guess that if these people were like me, they’re putting anywhere around 300-400 miles on their vehicle during a five-day work week. Factor in recreational/weekend driving, and we’re looking at possibly the necessity to fill up once a week. At $140.00 a fill up.

In 1993, my parents bought me a Sega Genesis at a Price Club, for roughly $140.00. Think about that for a second – basically, whatever guzzler this person is driving could have literally bought an entire video game console, with a second controller and Ecco the Dolphin, every single week, for what they’re paying for in gasoline. Fuckin’ crazy.

The cost of car sanity

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The guy I suspect is gay, who sits in the cube behind where I’m currently sitting, bought a car, literally two days before I purchased mine.  Despite the fact that while talking cars two weeks prior to our respective purchases, and me mentioning just how much I regretted purchasing a used car, and that crooked people will pay crooked mechanics crooked money in order to have things not appear on CarFaxes, he still went out and purchased a used car.  A Volkswagen Cabrio, no less, which further justifies my suspicions about his sexual orientation, despite the fact that he has a wife and two kids.

But anyway, I thought I got a lot of flak for buying a car that was seven years old, but he went out and purchased a car that was discontinued outright in 2002.  Granted, his rationale was simply the fact that he did not want to have a car payment at all, which I can understand, but after the misery I just recently left behind, I’m fairly confident that there’s a very good chance that even my next-next car will be new, even if it means I’m locked into a car loan for several years, at least I’ll have the piece of mind that for all intents and purposes, I shouldn’t have to worry about my car, for at least a year or so.

Today, he’s already griping about how his window is stuck down, which is kind of amazing, considering his model is power-nothing, so there’s no regulators or window engines to have malfunctioned, simply his window crank is locked in place, and he can’t fix it.  Furthermore, the lock cylinder in one of his doors is already broken, meaning he’s having to enter his car through the passenger seat.  Man shit, even in the lemon, did I not have these kind of problems.  Regardless, it’s this kind of backlash, that despite the fact that I’ll be dumping a lot of money into a car payment for a lot of months, I still take solace in the fact that when we both leave work today, I’ll be sitting on my cozy leather-heated seats, with the functioning windows, while he’ll be chilly and miserable driving home to his week-old broken, already junker.