Things that might be decidedly odd…

Car Repair

I got up early this morning to drop my car off at the mechanic at 7am. After dropping it off, I took the bus over to work arriving way earlier than usual (just before 8am). A few hours later, the shop called me back and said fixing the light would be $43 (they had to replace the whole thing) and that they’d throw on some touch up paint for free.

The light looks good and the touch up paint is fine. The part where paint is missing is so small, I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble and cost of bringing in my insurance and the person who hit me’s insurance to get the whole panel repainted. You can see where the touch up paint was added, but since my car is once again dirty from the rain, it’s hard to tell what’s dirt and what’s touch up paint. I took some pictures, but the flash exacerbates the new paint as well.

For now, my car is back in full working order and I’d rather just not deal with this fender-bender bullshit anymore. We’ll see though. I still have time to change my mind about getting the whole panel repainted, although I’m sure it’ll be expensive, I’ll have to go to a body shop to get an estimate, give up my car for at least a day while they paint it and let it dry, and so on. At this point it hardly seems worth it, especially considering that I parallel park this car on the street in the city enough that it’s probably just a matter of time before I or somebody else dings the bumper.

Crash

This morning while driving to work a Dodge Magnum rear-ended my shiny new car on the northbound onramp to I-5 at Olive. I was stopped at the yield sign waiting for the traffic on the left to go by when I heard a loud pop and my car lurched forward a little.

I pulled over to the shoulder and got out of the car. To say the least, I was pretty angry. The woman started totally freaking out about how she was driving her mother’s car eventhough she’s not supposed to be. I kept telling her to calm down, but she continued to freak out, trying to wipe away the scuff marks and paint damage on my car. Finally, I convinced her to give me her information.

I was shaken up a bit too (definitely doing that silent angry thing), mostly because I had no idea what to do (call the police? my insurance? nobody?). After examining the back of my car I detemined that the damage was fairly minor and almost certainly way below any insurance deductible. Still, the woman convinced me to follow her over to her work (a new car dealership on Lake City Way). I figured I might get some minor stuff fixed at her expense this way at the very least. At the body shop, the techs cleaned all the scuff marks off with some water and some sort of organic solvent, revealing the actual damage.

There doesn’t appear to be any body damage since it was mostly plastic that was hit at low speed. There’s a small fleck of paint that needs to be touched up on the bumper and one of the license plate lights needs a new mount (it’s loose right now). All in all, it should be easy to fix. I’m going to take the car over to the service department at the Mazda dealer some time this week to get it all taken care of. Hopefully, the woman will pay me back.

Ugh, what an obnoxious inconvinience.

New Car Pictures

It’s raining today which has made it difficult to get a picture of me with my car outside. However, I did manage to snap a picture of me and my car in my parking garage this morning before heading off to brunch.

I got another one last night too which shows the sides better. However, it was dark and I couldn’t get a very good angle on it.

Finally

Well, I finally bought the car this morning over in Kirkland.

I spoke with a salesman yesterday about a blue one I’d found on the online inventory listing, but unfortunately it hadn’t arrived on their lot yet and more importantly had already been sold. I wasn’t too excited about the white one they did have, but I decided to make an appointment to take a look anyways.

The more I thought about it last night, the more I realized I liked white better than almost all the other colors anyways. I still think the blue looked cooler, but I’d tie white with dark gray and definitely put it above red (too flashy for my tastes), black (shows dirt too easily), silver (meh), purple (too stereotypical) or “phantom blue” (aka dark teal–didn’t that go out of fashion years ago?).

When I saw the car this morning, I decided that white was actually great especially considering the car had the exact trim and options I wanted. I did have to pay a little extra for that color though because it’s the special perlescent paint, but in the end it was only about 1% of the cost anyways.

The whole thing went surprisingly fast. I got there around 10:20am and was out the door with a new car by 12:30pm. That included a test drive of the specific car, waiting for them to wash the car, a tour of the dealership, waiting for the financing, etc. I ended up using a discount Ford offers to the employees of its partners (I guess it’s because we sell lots of software to Ford corporate?). Basically, I paid a non-negotiable price of invoice plus destination and then Ford or Mazda corporate pays a kickback to the dealer for their time and trouble.

Oil Change

I took my car over to Pennzoil 10 Minute Oil Change in Redmond to (what else?) get the oil changed. In the past, I’ve pretty much always gone to Jiffy Lube. I know they’re a terrible place to have work done on your car, but I just don’t have the patience to make an appointment and then wait around for longish periods of time to have it done at a regular mechanic. The thing that really ticks me off about them though is that they always seem to find something wrong with my car and proceed to ask me if I want that taken care of too. When I know they’re trying to screw me over, I say no, but when I don’t know what they’re talking about I usually capitulate. The Jiffy Lube in Bellevue near work seems to be worse about this than others. Plus, if I recall correctly it had an icky waiting room (greasy floor is the waiting area–not the shop floor).

So I figured I’d try a different place this time and see how it went. I can’t complain (at least so far) about the Pennzoil place. The service was very, very quick (there wasn’t any wait though), the guy helping me was hot and polite and most importantly they didn’t try to sell me a transmission flush, air filter or similar. Even with name brand oil, it only cost about $30 although admittedly I did get a Microsoft discount of 25%.