Someone I know is at this moment calling Wal-Mart to make sure that they carry batteries for Nissan cars. She thinks they might not carry them because Nissans are “foreign cars.”
I know next to nothing about cars, so maybe I’m wrong here. But I want to make sure. It strikes me as strange, almost bizarre thing to think–that Nissan cars could “foreign” enough to make it likely that a chain wouldn’t carry batteries for them.
But am I being uncharitable?
For reference, this is the same person who thinks the EPA fined a local man for having a refrigerator in his back yard, having come to know it was there “because of satellites.”
They are indeed foreign cars. Well, except for the ones made in Tennessee and Mississippi, I guess. Those aren’t so foreign.
You might not know much about cars, but you know a lot more than your friend here. A battery is a battery, for the most part. And while there are some differences between them a major chain should have batteries that fit all major brands.
Frylock, you should be ashamed of yourself for being so unhelpful. You should have explained how Nissan batteries are available only by mail-order from Japan and directed this person to look for the battery order form on Nissan’s Web site.
Frylock is using it as an example of this person’s general intelligence level. She believes that the E.P.A. uses satellites to discover violations of the law prohibiting the keeping of refrigerators in the back yard and then fines such culprits.
Is it really that surprising that a woman wouldn’t know much about cars? She probably is used to having her dad or husband (depending on age) take care of such matters.
I think you’re being uncharitable to say it’s “almost bizarre” that she made this assumption. She sounds like she doesn’t know much about cars but there are a lot of people out there like that, it hardly makes her an anomaly.
And I have to say, calling ahead to make sure the store has your part isn’t exactly an idiot move.
Once upon a time, it was more difficult to get parts and service for “foreign” cars and in most towns you can still find vestiges of this in your phone book in ads that haven’t changed in years advertising service for foreign and domestic makes as a selling point. In more rural areas, I wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t still a bit more difficult to get less common levels of service (i.e. a water pump for an '03 Hyundai in Flyspeck, Arkansas) very easily.
But the idea that a car battery would be unavailable at Walmart for something as dirt common as a Nissan is about 20 years out of date. Good to call to make sure that they have something that you need before you go, especially in a situation where one has only one vehicle and that vehicle has a dead battery so you’re relying on a ride or a tow to get a replacement, but using the “foreignness” of the vehicle as a rationale for checking is out of touch.
I know they’ve upgraded their product, but when I hear “Nissan” the first thing that comes to mind is one of those cheapie rustbuckets they sold in the '70s.
I had this peice of shit Nissan Pulsar, an '85, that my Mom gave me after she’d spent four years driving the hell out of it and never maintaining it. It was a tiny little car with an engine less pwoerful than the power supply in my iPod. It was electric blue and extremely comical, like a toy motorized car for children. But when you’re a kid and have no money and need a ride, you drive what you can get your hands on. In a couple more years it rusted to the point that my friends would helpfully point out that I appeared to have a car on my rust. Around 1992 or so, the CO of my Army unit commented to me that he really enjoyed it when I arrived at work because my car made a different horrible sound every day, and he was always curious to know what new sound it would make.
But you know what? That sumbitch ran, and ran, and ran, and ran. All the maintenance I ever did to it was oil changes, when I remembered, and a muffler replacement. And still it ran. Then I left it to rot in a parking lot for a couple of years, and gave it to my sister’s boyfriend, assuming it would never run again. He put about $150 into it and it ran, and ran, and ran some more. I think we put a million miles on it. I am sure someone out there somewhere, presumably someone not really hung up on personal dignity, is still driving it today. Perhaps it is being driven in some Third World country.
Three hundred million years from now, when humans have vanished from the earth and the planet is dominated by intelligent insects or something, there’s going to be some six-foot tall weird-ass roach-man driving my Mom’s 1985 Nissan Pulsar.