Le Bug Est Morte. Vive Le Civic.

So I took my car in for an oil change on Monday---

Wait. I've got some new readers, some people that I've met relatively recently, some out of towners that might not get the import of that opening. See, over the past three years or so, the line "I took my car in for an oil change. . . " has become kind of a thing for me. You know. Whats it called--like, "It was a dark and stormy night. . . " or "Once upon at time. . . " It's a trope. A signal to a knowledgeable audience of what is to come. Because, for the past few years, any set up that begins with "I took my car in for an oil change" has inevitably ended with the punchline "Seven hundred dollars."

So I took my car in for an oil change and braced myself for news that my left-dongled air framus was completely shot and would need to be replaced for--say it with me now--seven hundred dollars. Sure enough, Tuesday morning, my phone rings and it's Dave from Volkswagen Service (authors note: I just deleted about 500 words on how and why I hate Dave from Volkswagen Service, or one word for every $10 I've thrown down the gaping maw of Dave's quenchless evil), speaking words that strike fear deep into my jaded heart: "Do you have pen?"

What followed was a list of truly epic proportions, both in magnitude of cost and number of broken parts. When combined with the over $1000 it would cost to fix my long-dead air conditioning, we're talking more-than-the-blue-book-value-of-the-car epic proportions. So I did the only thing I could possibly do: I asked Dave to have it appraised for a trade in and started to panic.

See, I had been starting to prepare for this eventuality. Honest, I had. I have a little file folder at home that has specs on a range of cars I was considering, quotes on insurance rates, some information from dealers. But I wasn't, you know, emotionally prepared for this. I fired off an email to my mom then ran into a friend's office. "I just need to sit here and panic for a moment," I said.

Years ago, in The Oak, I was crippled with a combination of indecision and apathy. For five consecutive rounds of drinks, I simply turned to the waiter and said "Bring me something fruity." It worked out pretty well. Sometimes it's things like that, the decision to stop deciding, the hitting of the "Fuck It" button, if you will, that is the best course of all.

I called five different dealerships and assembled a crack team of sales minions. "My car just died. I want a stick shift and a lease payment of less than $250," I said. "Go."

As my sales minions began calling me back, I started my wheat-from-the-chaff process. Want me to come in? Pfft. You're done. I don't have a car! Didn't you get that? Want to ask me a lot of stupid questions? You are going to get stupid answers:

Volkswagen Joe: So you are looking for a Beetle or a Rabbit, I take it?

North: Well, if you can get me into a Phaeton for $250 I'm not going to stop you.

And, slowly, slowly, even though I kept up a continuous freak out, I realized that I ended up doing a lot of things right. Since I didn't have a trade-in value, I didn't tell any of the sales chimps about trading in the old one until after they had already given me a quote. When it whittled down to two competing dealerships, I had exact numbers in hand so I could play them off one another.

Getting a car is a strange process. There's something crazy and intimidating about it. Like I said, I ended up playing my cards right purely by accident. On Tuesday, Dealer A gave me one quote, and Dealer B gave me a quote that was a bit lower. Then I got a value for the trade in of the Beetle, so I called Dealer A back--and with the trade in, now Dealer A had a little lower offer than Dealer B. So I called Dealer B, and they bumped their quote down. That was where things got weird. I mean, I had to call Dealer A back and see if they could match Dealer B's quote, right? For various reasons (location, etc.) I would prefer to deal with A than B, but not if it was going to cost more. But I felt so intimidated--I had to give myself this ridiculous pep-talk before I could make the call, and I was limp with relief when it went into the salesman's voicemail.

I read Backlash at an impressionable age, so I always think at first that things like this are the result of some internalization on my part of archaic social norms about girls having to be "nice." Then again, it's not like I'm some kind of wilting flower here. Ask around, I'm sure there are plenty of people who can testify that I have no problem being pushy and demanding. And, seriously, if I were buying something from a regular store that offered price-matching, I wouldn't have any problem marching in with a competitor's price and asking them to match it. So why did I feel like I was doing something wrong when I called Dealer A? I was really, very, uncharacteristically inhibited about it. I don't like feeling like a weenie. And I don't like feeling like a weenie and not understanding why I feel like a weenie.

In the end, I got $2000 for the Squashed Bug and knocked eighty bucks of the quote I was given. I spent all day Thursday chewing my nails and twitching and waiting for someone to call me and tell me that NO! You can't have a new car! You must throw thousands of dollars away on the bug FOREVER!!!!!

But that didn't happen. Instead, at six o'clock, Honda Joe handed me the keys to a shiny new Honda Civic. It's practical, it's moderately zippy, it looks like the Starship Enterprise on the inside, it doesn't smell funny, and it only has 35 miles on it as of this morning's drive to work. I'm a little bit in love with it, to be honest. Wanna go somewhere? Just. . . not too far, because I have to keep the miles down.