The Car is Dead. Thank God.

[jcfiala]

My wife Tammy has owned a green Hyundai hatchback since she and her folks bought it for her ten years ago, about ten days after she met me. She used it pretty consistantly until about June of last year, when someone rammed it in the back badly enough to jam the hatchback shut. Her insurance company took a look at it and told us they were going to total it out, handed us $1200, and we started looking for a new car.

We got it soon enough, which left us with the question of what to do with the old one. It still worked just fine - you simply couldn't open the back. Tammy had a friend, who I will call B- for privacy's sake, who needed a car, so they agreed that she'd pay Tammy $100 a month for eight months and B- could keep the car.

It went well at first, but B- started getting later and later with her payments. At the end of the year she'd only paid $400 out of the $600 she should have paid us by then, but she revealed that she'd be getting a decent amount of a tax refund from the Federal Government, and she'd give us $400 then.

Well, It hit mid-March and not a word. B- had lost telephone service for not paying, so we hadn't been able to call her, but we went by her apartment - where no one answered, and we didn't see the car outside. We started getting worried that she was going to stiff us on the $400, and Tammy started to think about starting legal actions.

Well, until last night, when we received a letter from the Sheriff's office. Our car had been impounded for being abandoned a week or so ago, and so headed out to the impound lot to get it back.

First shock - it's going to be $260 to get it back. Ouch. Tammy went to look at the car (they'd only let one person), so I waited in the waiting room for news. When she came back, she told me the car wouldn't start, although the battery seemed to have plenty of power. We sat down and thought about it. A tow back to the house. Another tow to a repair place. Maybe $300 to replace the starter, and $260 to get it out of the impound... it wasn't worth it.

Apparently the car had been abandoned on the street for nine days, at which time they picked it up. It still had some of B-'s stuff in it, but Tammy saw no reason to get it out for her - if she left it in the car for nine days, then she probably doesn't want it.

It's nice to have it over. Don't have to go through all the trouble of finding the car and getting it back. We got money from it being totalled and $400 from B-, and we'll just leave it at that.

So we went out for Sushi.

Comments

[nhlsteffi.livejournal.com]

Yup. Sometimes it's just easier to look at the bright side, rather than dwell on the dark.

[eredien]

That's quite possibly one of the best semi-tangental endings I've ever read.

Rare Earth

[lcowper.livejournal.com]

Long time ago, pre-marriage, Mike had a car we affectionately called (or sometimes cursed at as) "the deathtrap." He'd bought it for something like $100 after wrecking his old one-- something to tide him over till he had money for something better. It would get your from point A to point B and that was the best you could say for it. My mind has since blanked out most of the horrors of the car, but I do remember that there were holes in the passenger side floorboards such that you could look down and watch the road pass under your feet. At any rate, he eventually got something else and sold it to someone who did demolition derbies for $50, signed over the title and forgot all about it. 6 months later, he gets a letter from the police. The deathtrap, now listed as being primer gray in colour, had been picked up some 3-4 months before abandoned and impounded. Apparently the new owner had never bothered to transfer the title. The impound fees were ridiculous, especially considering it had taken them 3-4 months to bother to write (I wonder if a person could protest the fees on the basis of their failure to inform you in a timely manner?). At any rate, we had a good laugh at the thought of anyone paying the impound fees on the deathtrap and tossed the letter.