Well, I don’t hate the actual automobiles, but I do hate buying them. Seriously. I really, really hate buying cars. It feels like I’ve been looking for a new car for all of eternity, when in fact it’s only been a few months. I’ve been looking at AutoTrader several times a day and checking and rechecking the local newspapers as yet to no avail.
My last car, a ‘peppy’ Rover 100, died a few weeks ago, meaning we’ve been completely petrol-free. The savings I am making and the extra steps may be good for both the planet’s and my own health.
The biggest problem we have encountered in buying a car is the car salesmen – a strange bunch of middle-aged men, wearing a worrying amount of jewellery, determined to confuse and frustrate anyone who steps onto their forecourt. I seriously do not understand them. So far I have had one salesman threaten to break my arm if I didn’t buy a car (he was probably joking), another who refused to let us take a car for a test drive unless we bought the car first (a strange concept) and another who kept referring to the cars we were looking at as cheap. This third salesman annoyed Faith so much that she asked him to stop referring to our price range as cheap as we’d saved up a long time to be able to spend this much money, and told him that he was being insulting and rude. He kept trying to talk to Adlai, but Adlai just stared at him…perhaps dazzled by the amount of faux gold he was wearing.
Fear not, though…it seems that our car woes may be approaching an end. We actually encountered a salesman this week who didn’t threaten to break any limbs or insult us. He even seemed happy for us to actually start the engines on a couple of the cars…
