Bad Things Come In Pairs

As I am getting ready to go into a meeting in a rather shady section of New Jersey, I realize that leaving my GPS plugged in and displayed would be more like putting a sign on my car that reads….break my window with any heavy object nearby and steal my GPS and anything else valuable you might find. With this in mind, I go to unplug the power cord…as the stupid thing won’t stay charged for more than a few minutes on its own…and low and behold, wouldn’t you know it…the damn thing breaks…some little metal piece on the end disengages itself from the body and decides to lodge itself in the tiniest cranny you could imagine inside the lighter. Now, I am really pissed, because I am in a less than desirable town and have no idea how to get back home….I need the assistance of my GPS “Take Me Home” feature….almost like Dorothy on the Wizard of Oz with her ruby slippers that take her home…okay…desperate measures call for desperate tactics. I take a paper clip and shove it into the lighter trying to retrieve the missing piece…yeah….bright idea Einstein…that causes a mini fireworks show in the front of my car.

Needless to say…I am without a charger in my car. But, we all know that bad things always happen in pairs. The next thing to go in my SUV is the CD player. Let me explain that my CD player is the kind where you have to feed the CD’s into a slot on the dashboard…this means once they are in there…there really is no way of getting them out without taking a hammer and just smashing what I am calling the biggest piece of crap car in the world…don’t we all say that when something goes wrong with our car. I have five CDs just stuck inside my car…its as if the car literally ate them.

So, I take my car to the garage today to see how much these two ridiculous repairs are going to cost me….the cigarette lighter appears to be the minor of the two problems…worst case scenario $80 to fix…okay, not bad I tell myself…..but with good news, also comes bad news….they can not fix the CD player….that has to go to a specialty shop and could cost a lot of money to repair…..now, I don’t know about you, but I am not about to be spending hundreds of dollars to fix a CD player on a car that is almost eight years old.

Cars and I have a lot of issues….I am not one to continuously take my car to the garage for repairs….think of it this way…if my car where a child, someone would have called DYFS on me along time ago. My check engine light has been on for almost a month as I refuse to pay the $85 for them to “just hook it up to the diagnostic machine”. It’s not a person, it’s a car. When all these issues start piling on…my motto is usually to bail on the car…trade it in for something newer and better. I just can’t handle constantly being barraged with minor problems that add up to thousands of dollars in repairs. I would rather put that money into a new vehicle. I am obviously not the mechanics dream client as I routinely refuse the suggestions they make for my car. Well, off to start window shopping for my poor car’s replacement. Wish me luck.