The College Clunker

There are two main kinds of college student cars.

1)      I come from money & Daddy loves me.

2)      I reuse disposable stuff & my car’s kinda in that category.

I have the second kind. I JUST got it out of the shop for having the serpentine belt replaced. It had been making a sound like Superman sharpening a machete. A horrible scraping . . . which the mechanic diagnosed, then fixed everything ELSE & returned the car to me. Um . . . it’s still making the sound – did you replace the belt? Oh, no . . . bring it in. WHAT THE HELL? So eventually, I got my car back, all better with something else replaced under the hood. I recently had to get a new battery too.

So I was driving to class the other day, back when I was only $500 in debt to my mother, & a new sound, rather like the old sound developed. Only this time, it was like the Flash sharpening a rusty machete. And I could feel it in the accelerator. It was awfully loud & fairly constant, so I parked my car on the second floor of the Union Garage, turned it off, & sent a text message to a friend asking if I could get a ride home. I checked under the hood, not because I know anything about cars other than how to check the oil, jump or change a battery, or change a headlight, but because sometimes you don’t have to know anything to see something that makes you go, “Oh . . . shit.”

I saw nothing of the sort, but reported to my mother that I didn’t feel comfortable driving the car until I was driving it *to* the mechanic’s. She called them & relayed the info & the words ‘tow truck’ entered the conversation. And what day did I pick to forget to charge my cell phone. My battery readout shows empty while I talk to one AAA woman who says the tow truck will be right over & then the dispatch woman who says that even though the first woman said it would be no problem, the tow truck wouldn’t come into the garage & I had to drive the car to the street. The mechanic said not to drive the car another *foot* or it could really screw things up & jack up the price fast.

And that’s when I discovered the best way to meet guys on a college campus. Yeah, I know about parties & stuff, but I can never go to parties. I’m just too uncomfortable in crowds. And besides, this new way is efficient, because it automatically weeds out the jerks & lazy ones. Just start pushing your car. It’s like a chivalry radar. I started out with one hand in the car steering (without power steering - youch) & the rest of my body pushing against the door frame with my friend on the other side. I ended inside the car, foot on brake, both hands on the steering wheel, being pushed by a fleet of men. We weren’t about to manually parallel park the sucker on the street, so we parked it (rather badly) in the closest space to the exit. We had already given them the location of the exit on Cross Campus, so we had to push it *up* a level, rather than down to the other exit.

So, um . . . if you drove into the Union Garage the other day & muttered a profanity at the idiot backed into the first space, um . . . sorry. Totally not related to my driving skills.

Seeing my car hoisted up by its front wheels in preparation for the tow was like seeing a friend get secured to a stretcher. The guy driving the tow truck was a sweetheart. He heard me mutter to myself, “My poor car.” & assured me she’d be fine soon. :)

$1100. Ouch. That’s more than five times the bluebook value of the thing.

The ac compressor was busted & not cooling the engine. Had I driven it, it could have cost upwards of $4,000.