Okay, this actually happened last Sunday but I had to take a while to calm down about it.
Last Friday, my birthday, Sept. 29, I get up and start going to work. I’m driving down the street and I hear some funky sounds coming out of my car - that loud clicking that you usually get when you really need to put oil in it. I get out and sure enough, it’s bone-dry, which is really odd because I’d just checked the oil two weeks prior.
So I put a quart of oil into her and limp it to work. I put more oil in it at lunch and got home. My car was still acting up but it was acting like it was alright.
Fast forward to Sunday. I had to go to the Sprint store to get a new phone, so the Tashaboy and I pile into the car and go up there. I get the phone and start to head home.
I’m on Carson Street, which is the main street here in Carson City, and pretty busy, when suddenly I hear something go CLUNK and stuff starts flying out from under my car. I screamed in horror and sadness, as the Tashaboy’s car also died recently so now we’d be down from one car to NO car. I pull into the parking lot and the Tashaboy tells me “GET OUT OF THE CAR!” and runs into a nearby pizzaria.
I’m really confused, especially since now there’s people who saw it happen pulling in and telling me to get out of the car, too. I grab my purse and dash out.
My boyfriend comes out of the pizzaria with a fire extinguisher and he and some other guy put out the fire that was formerly my engine and a woman calms me down because I am FREAKING. THE FUCK. OUT. at this point.
I call my mom and she says she’ll come pick us up. While we’re waiting for her the crowd thins out and the fire department shows up to confirm that the fire is, indeed, out. They disconnect the battery to the Highwind (the car’s name) to ensure that no sparks start more fires, and leave after taking some sort of incident report.
So, the point of all this, was that my car blew a rod, THROUGH THE OIL PAN, and caught fire. I sold the car to a junkyard because I don’t have the resources to rebuild an engine. I got 35 dollars for the Highwind, a car that had served me for three years and got me from Pennsylvania back to Nevada. I strongly considered taking the alternator out as a kind of trophy, because I’d had to replace it so often, but when I looked under the hood, the fire had actually melted key parts of the alternator to the car.
Flash to today. I’m going to all kinds of buy-here-pay-here car dealerships to try to get a cheap truck or something so that I don’t have to hitch a ride to work every day. No one is willing to work with me and a lot of these places want half down and won’t take payments on the down payment. I have maybe three hundred bucks available to me at the moment, and it’s not even technically mine; my parents are loaning it to me. If I had a thousand to plunk down on a car, don’t you think I’d have bought one from an individual by now?
In short, I’m very frustrated because I’m an honest person, and a hard worker, and I’m getting screwed over because I’m poor. I understand why people don’t take risks with credit, really, I do. I just wish there was something I could do; buying from an individual is almost entirely out unless I can find a cheap, cheap, CHEAP car that runs well (unlikely) because people tend to want all of their money up front. And dealerships don’t want to take a risk on me. This would be a pitting except that I just don’t have the energy. I went to ten different dealerships today, and every car that I wanted to get was under $3,000.
The only upside to this is that because I’m most likely going to wind up walking the three miles to work every day (and three miles back home), I’m most likely going to lose weight. Kick ass.
~Tasha
