Car reprise

I hereby retract my apology in a previous post, in which I expressed remorse for unleashing ourselves on various car salespersons in the area. On the contrary, the salespersons have proven themselves well equipped to deal with clueless car buyers such as ourselves, in the sense that we come away from discussions with them feeling even more clueless. This, of course, is what they are trained to do. 

Our most recent salesperson evidently has taken an advanced training course in Bewildering the Customer. In this course, participants learn to wear customers down by simply talking on and on about the details of their own lives. We now know this woman's family intimately, including the heights of all her siblings, their complete history of parking tickets, and what her two children are getting for Christmas. We almost feel as if we should send the kids Christmas cards ("Hi, Jasmine. You don't know us, but we just thought we'd wish you a Merry Christmas. Do you want to know what your mom got you for Christmas? We can tell you where she hid it, too. We helped finance it, by the way.").

The tactic did not wear us down enough to beg her to sell us a car, although it did suffice to send us straight home after our visit instead of stopping at any of the nearby competitors, which we had fully intended to do. 

But her tactic may have been quite deliberate. All of her personal details were related as we were sitting in the car, giving us plenty of time to tune her out and become one with the car, visualizing zipping over mountain passes in it, imagining smoothly cutting through snow-covered roads. She probably hoped that we would bond so completely with the car that we would just refuse to get out of it, and demand that the manager get in the car with us to go over all the details so that we could just take it right home.

But we are wiser than that, of course. We stayed focused on the important things we want in a car -- e.g., that it has a sufficient number of cup holders. We voiced our relief at discovering that the car we were considering offered an extra two cup holders when the middle armrest in the backseat folded down.

"Oh, do you have little ones?" the saleswoman asked.

Um, no. Just us. 

As the Hero observes, our concern about always having beverages within reach would lead one to believe that we have been impoverished for most of our lifetime and are afraid that, at any moment, we might be deprived of life-nourishing liquids. Let me just say that we both were duly provided with adequate hydration during our bringing-up years and were in no way neglected in this respect. 

Another concern in a car, along with the cup holder count, is color. At least for me. The Hero warned that, particularly if we were to go with a used car, I might not get EXACTLY the color I wanted. 

This comment was met with such a stare from me that he began to worry that he might not EXACTLY get dinner that night, either, or any other night. Nothing further has been said on the subject of color.

And finally, a third important feature in a car is comfort, mainly because, like cup holder and color, it starts with c. Happily, the car we were considering is very comfortable, although if it had a bed and refrigerator it would be REALLY comfortable. But we wouldn't want to be too greedy.

Just as long as the ratio of cup holders to people is at least 3 to 1.