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Blog - February 2005 |
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This page stores my blog entries from February 2005. The entries are dated February 17 and February 27.
Lemony-Fresh Ninja: 1989 - 2005 / Bizarre and Annoying Salesmen: Glad I'm not One of Them blahday, February blah, 2005 Back on a cold February morning in 1996, I drove my old 1982 Buick Century towards U.C. Davis. I had that car all through my senior year in high school. In the fast lane of the freeway, that old car gave it its last and collapsed. The next weekend, my parents and I went car shopping, looking for something for me to drive to school in. We weren't having much luck until one salesman asked, "what was it that you had before?" When we told him, he recalled them just getting a Buick Century in; a grey 1989 model. After sitting in it and feeling like I was home again and after some haggling, we eventually drove that Buick Century home. At around 47,000 miles, it had a lot of life left. I drove that old car all over the place. Commuting to and from UC Davis for nearly 4.5 years, 4 days a week or so. I made at least two trips to San Francisco/San Leandro/Santa Clara, one to Lake Tahoe for a friend's wedding, and one to Yountville for another friend's wedding. Many a great time I had with that vehicle. For a couple of years, I used to keep a lemon-scented air freshener -- the kind you tend to use in restrooms -- in the cupholder. A high school friend nicknamed it the "Lemony-Fresh Mobile." Those air fresheners worked great to keep it smelling decent. When I accidentally spilled a liquified one into the arm rest, I decided to stop using them. On a different occasion, I met a friend for lunch at Cookie's, a great independent hamburger joint. He told me that he looked up in his rear-view mirror, saw my car, looked down, and when he looked to the side, my car was miraculously parked next to him. He got out of the car and said, "Dave, your car is ninja." From then on, that Buick became the Lemony-Fresh Ninja. With the many great memories came many pains of repairs. Twice I had the alternator replaced, with the second one being swapped back out due to it overcharging. Said overcharging led to the second of two batteries being replaced as well. Not too long after we bought the car, we had the transmission serviced. It turned out that the huge time gap between gear-changing was due to me not really having a second gear anymore. It skipped from first to third until, not too much afterward, it stayed in first. After new tires, numerous oil changes, pipes replaced for power steering leaks and bad radiator hoses, the transmission ultimately gave out in the end. At 118,376 miles, the Lemony-Fresh Ninja, aka my 1989 Buick Century, will no longer live to see another happy day in my life. Armed with some buying power, I look for a newer car. R.I.P., my poor Century. ***** The sad demise of my Buick as allowed me to experience the current crop of Car Salesmen. I think I can speak for most that buying a car is one of the more unpleasant experiences in life. The salesman isn't necessarily the problem. Too many factors work into the equation. I started out thinking I wanted a truck, eventually changing my mind and bought a nice sedan. The beginning allowed me to pay attention to the salesmen and their tactics. First on my list to visit was a local Ford dealership. A salesman approached and seemed rather friendly. He talked quite a bit and liked to joke a bit. We took a look at a Ford Ranger and took it for a drive. This guy loved to talk. He had some funny stories that eventually involved people of assorted ethnicities. He said nothing completely insensitive, but mentioning that a person is "Mexican" or such when noting it in his story didn't matter just seemed a bit crass. Or something. It made me a bit uncomfortable, and being not completely thrilled with the truck, I didn't buy or go back. The next day, I traveled to an auto mall. My parents and I saw some Ford Rangers in the ad, and I thought I'd check them out. When I got there, one set of special vehicles had sold, and the other set all had manual transmissions. Neither of those would work for me because I don't drive manual transmissions and have no desire to learn. The salesman here helped a lot. He kept a nice, casual, and fairly quiet demeanor. We looked at other possibilities in the used car section, eventually taking some interest in a Mazda pick-up. Apparently Ford owns Mazda and, pretty much, makes those trucks exactly like the Ranger. We test-drove it and eventually sat at the table working up a deal. Something about the whole deal struck me rather odd, so I killed it. He tried to persuade me otherwise, even going towards getting his supervisor to try to force the sale. Given that I tend to get more stubborn with more pressure, I walked away from that truck and, eventually, the whole dealership. On the same day in the same auto mall, I checked out the Buick dealership. I decided I wanted to just look around at vehicles and not have a salesman bus me around and bother me. As I stepped out of my rental car and walked towards the used car section, I could hear footsteps behind me. Eventually, this salesman, a young man, caught up with me and latched himself on. After the stress of looking at trucks, I realized that I really wanted a sedan. I thought a 2-door would be more economical, so I expressed this to the salesman. He promptly showed me a 2-door Honda Accord with an all-leather interior and a sweet stereo system. Unfortunately, it had 73,000 miles on it and screamed "steal me." Looking further, we found a nice Nissan Altima. Unfortunately, this time, he couldn't find the keys. Refusing to ever buy a car I never test-drove, I followed him into the building, figuring he might have some other way of finding something. Instead, he wanted to get contact information so he could call me with possible vehicles. I declined a couple of times in the presence of his sales manager, and, after the sales manager said that they "do what the customer wants", I asked a third time for just his business card. I did not go back to that mall at all. Becoming a car salesman never appealed. I would never push a deal or do anything of the such to make someone pay more than they should. If only auto dealers would move towards a more honest stance and pay their salesmen a flat salary (rather than on commission; this may happen at places like CarMax or Saturn, where the prices are fixed), a consumer wouldn't have all that pressure and stress. I know this would never happen, since, I'm sure, auto dealers probably feel they best motivate their salesmen this way.
Date for Previous Entry / California and Sacramento CNN Headlines / Better Printer Acquired / Are you Ready for some ... Baseball? / Getting Skinny Again: My Current Battle Succeeding Sunday, February 27, 2005 In case anyone wondered, the date on the previous entry should have been for February 17. During monthly transitions for my blog, I just throw in whatever for the date, uncertain as to when I'll have time to write enough to post online. Apparently, in the rush and stress of car buying, I forgot to change the date to accurately reflect when I finished that entry. Instead of changing it, I'll keep it as-is for its charm or quirkiness. ***** I check out CNN's web site daily to look at headlines and to check out select stories. Today (February 23), Sacramento or California found itself in the spotlight at least five times on the main page:
For the number of headlines, that seemed to represent an unusually high percentage. A segment like this may become a regular part of my blog. I won't point out stories California- or Sacramento-related, but I will point out stories I find interesting or funny, making my usual commentaries with my peculiar eye for things in life. ***** I recently acquired an older HP printer (HP Deskjet 712c) from my girlfriend's family. My old Canon printer had too many issues that it made it virtually unusable (paper feed wouldn't work; would self-clean the print heads on its own after each print job). Despite this HP printer being able to print at most at half the speed of my old Canon printer, I think I spend less time printing things due to the struggles I had with the Canon printer. I do have one problem that morphed into two. After each printing with the HP printer, I get a white Windows (DOS?) error window that names "HPFVLS13" and an error message that merely says that an error occurred. It doesn't say what kind, but it gives me the option to either "Close" or "Ignore." I ignore the message and just continue working with no problems. The error message annoys me, since no reason should exist for it constantly coming up. So, I hopped online to check HP's site for possible solutions. Lo and behold, for whatever reason, HP's site simply will not come up. Normally, I get the generic IE "Cannot find server" page. Pam, my girlfriend, can get it perfectly fine at her house through her ISP. I think my ISP is going to get an e-mail from me about this one. Either way, I'm much happier with the HP printer. Hopefully, I can work out the weird bug and bop right along, happily printing away. ***** MLB.com's web site says that in 2 days, 11 hours, 3 minutes, the first Spring Training game in Major League Baseball will start. The first Giants Spring Training game falls on March 3, about 3.5 days away. The first White Sox Spring Training game: 2.5 days away. My excitement and happiness grows during this time of year not only due to the improving weather but for the emergence of baseball back into my life. Baseball always had a presence in my life. I started collecting baseball cards back in 1987 and collected up until 1993. I watched baseball games during the summer, remembering the sounds of peacocks crowing in the summer nights and feeling the warm-ish air blowing through the screen doors. My friends and I would play baseball variants at school, including using a soccer ball instead of a baseball for our "soccer baseball" games. Through the thick and thin, I stuck with baseball on some level or another. Despite the steroids hype, this year should be great for the game. Seeing Barry Bonds pass Babe Ruth and head to within striking distance of Hank Aaron's all-time MLB record will create so much excitement. Sure, people will still gripe about the whole steroids issue, but I think Barry will prove to be clean. (Ignoring the fact that he'd still have to hit the ball; many steroid-using people like Jose and Ozzie Canseco just weren't great hitters.) Once Eric Gagne returns, seeing if he'll continue his closing dominance will show whether he'll continue to be the real thing rather than an elongated flash in the pan. We'll see whether the Red Sox will repeat, or whether the overstocked Yankees will blow everyone away and reclaim their World Series title, something they claim once every four years or so. And, hopefully, Frank Thomas will be back to his old self and will anchor the middle of the White Sox lineup. With my Sports Weekly in tow and radio tuned at work to baseball games, I'll keep an ear and eye out for the assorted news and possibilities as the season progresses. And, despite my girlfriend not being in line for free River Cats tickets, we may still go to a game or two during the year. ***** I think I have been doing something right through the past few months. For all of my life, I have been the fat one at school. Occasionally I'd thin out during growth spurts, but those growth spurts didn't last all my life (thank god, since that would cause more problems than good). I ballooned from 218 lbs in high school to nearly 230 lbs. Then, during the summer before my last year at UC Davis, I took a summer placement in a doorway construction firm doing labor-intensive work. That, combined with playing 50 min. of racquetball three times a week throughout my last year at UCD, allowed me to shed a lot of weight, whittling myself down to nearly 194 lbs. Unfortunately, after I graduated, I sat around, trying different things toward developing a career. With no exercise and the stress of job-hunting and career-trying, I ballooned back up to around 225 lbs. At my last doctor appointment last December, they weighed me at 230 lbs. Over the last year or so, I have been exercising on a Nordic Trac and working on my eating habits. With sporadic exercising and, within the last few months, eating smaller portions and introducing a salad for lunch, Pam's scale says that I'm down to 216 lbs. I look thinner as well, and some of my smaller clothes speak as much as well. Just today, I wore a pair of shorts that I haven't been able to wear in at least over a year (possibly two or three years). I have a second pair of shorts that seem to fit as well, and I have a couple of dress pants that I could really use to supplement my work wardrobe. I have yet to check those, but I bet they'll fit decently as well. Now, with the car hunt behind me, I can start back on the exercising. Yes, weight loss is great once you achieve it, but one has to continue working in order to continue the weight loss and at least do enough to maintain that weight. |
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