Taking my car to the shop today for an air conditioning system checkup turned out to be as bad as I feared. The problems, however, were not with my A/C they were with my front-end suspension. It’s going cost me over a grand to fix too darn it. I guess I can’t really complain though; the car rolled off the assembly line in 1995 and has well over 130,000 miles on it (which for an American car such as a Chevrolet Monte Carlo is a stupendous feat.) The last time I had to put any significant amount of money into this vehicle was three years ago, so on average it’s still cheaper for me to keep this car than pay upwards of $200/mo. for a new one. I’m going to drive this car into the ground, baby! I’ll be “Flintstoning” it around town before I give it up!
Taking a car to the mechanic is always interesting. Not so much the act of taking it there, but the conversations you hear people (myself included) have with the mechanic. Here’s what every conversation sounds like to me in any given mechanic’s shop on any given day:
Mechanic: “Your thingamagadget is busted.”
Customer: “How much will that cost to fix?”
Mechanic: “About the GNP of a small country.”
Customer (after a contemplative pause): “Can I get by without fixing it?”
I have no idea why that strikes me as funny, it just does. Heck, I even had a conversation with the mechanic like that today. It’s a good thing we don’t adopt the same hesitancy to repairs when the doctor tells us we need some medical procedure. Of course, in that case we do have insurance so it’s not as big an issue to rack up a hospital bill of ginormous proportions. Why doesn’t car insurance cover routine maintenance like health insurance does?
