Doctober

After a ridiculously ridiculous weekend I realized that I haven’t been on the site in a while.  I pulled it up and realized that I haven’t posted anything since the end of September which is amazing because it seems like I was ready to pull my hair out last week.  Then I remembered that I was ready to pull my hair out last week…and the week before that.  Then I realized that I have been going on like this for the past five or six weeks. 

“All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy. ”  That saying has been going on in my brain a lot lately. 

I titled this post doctober because the general theme for this month has been going to the doctor.  My wife.  Me.  My cat.  My dishwasher.  I am pretty much sick of doctors.  I have officially enacted a new “if it isn’t bleeding or broken, no doctor” rule.  For myself at least.  My wife can go whenever she wants, but not me.  When I was having a hard time walking due a pain in my left hip a week ago my doctor told me that I had a spine issue and ordered an MRI.  Three visits and hundreds of dollars later I have been told that my spine is fine and that I just need to go on a diet.  My oldest cat has been having a hard time peeing lately.  So I took her to the cat doctor and hundreds of dollars later, I am told she is fine and just has a virus.  Even my dishwasher began having problems so I had the GE guy out and he said that we “over soap” the load causing water to leak through the door and that our dishwasher was fine.  I paid a guy 140.00 to tell me to use less soap.  I laughed when he told me how much it would be.  The conversation went like this:

“So how much do I owe you?”  The GE guy replied “$140.00″.  So I asked, “Why so much?”  to which he answers “90.00 for the trip and $50.00 to diagnose the problem.”  (h, and I failed to mention that he did turn a knob on my water heater to make my water a little warmer.) An extra fifty bucks to tell me to quit using so much soap and to turn a knob a quarter of an inch.  ”Sounds good to me, do you accept credit cards?” 

The bottom line is  October has me by the short hairs.  There has been an argument going on in my brain for the past 48 hours with a general theme of being tired of doing things that I don’t want to do.  I find myself spending a large amount of my time lately doing things that don’t fall under the “I am glad i’m doing this” category.  Even as recently as last night (Sunday night) I found myself in a tuxedo downtown at a wedding missing the Bears game.  In all of my crazy football addiction I did manage to keep my eye on the score, but I won’t lie about being very angry that I actually call any person that chooses to schedule his wedding on a Sunday night during a Bears game a good friend.  Take the Bears game out of the equation and you still have a very expensive wedding taking place down town in the loop on a Sunday night when everyone has to work on Monday.  Why?  To save a few grand?  What a waste of open bar.  If you are going to drop 75K on a wedding, why do it on a Sunday night when everyone has to leave at 9:30pm.  Seems like a waste of money to me. 

Now that I think of it, the general theme of October should be “Grumpy Dennis”

Filed under: Overcommitment, achy, asspain

Followup

I am at work today thinking about everything that is going on in my life and it’s really kind of interfering in my productivity.  So, in an attempt to get some stuff off my chest so that I can get back to work, here goes. 

In an update, my brother was released from jail on Monday and the chargest were all downgraded to a misdemeanor.  I was relieved to hear that because he is not likely to lose his job or see any jail time. 

I can’t stand it when people drop the ball.  All I will say about this is I got screwed by a few different people this week regarding a church event I am hosting and I don’t have a short term memory. 

There.  I said some things and got them off my chest.  I have so much more to say, but I have to refrain at this juncture of time.  I don’t know if this achieved what I wanted it to since I still have 100 things rattling around my brain.  Back to the hamster wheel.

Filed under: Church, asspain, train wreck

Red Lion and FTD

To wrap up the Vail portion of my trip (see last post to get caught up), we had drank our fair shar of beer in the hot tub at the Marriott and it was time to get ready and head off to dinner. 

Let me quickly say that still to this moment in life, I don’t think there is a better drinking environment than an outdoor hot tub with snow falling down staring up at the mountains.  That moment borderlines in my mind close to sitting on a beach with the sun setting and a nice cold corona.  I digress…

We were supposed to do dinner at The dusty boot in Beaver Creek.  From what I was told, that is a cool place to hang out after skiing.  But, due to the amount of alcohol drank at this point, we decided to do Red Lion for dinner.  We called The Red Lion and charged 150.00 to the credit card so that we could get a table right in front of Phil Long who I was told is the reason to go to Red Lion.  Having never been there, I didn’t really know what to expect.  The 150.00 would be credited to our bill and with four of us going there surely wouldn’t be an issue spending that much on dinner and drinks. 

When we arrived, I was a little surprised to find out that The Red Lion is seriously just a bar that offers food.  I didn’t get what the appeal was until 9:30 when Phil Long presented himself to our table.  We explained that Chris was celebrating a bachelor party and were surprised when Phil immediately ordered our table 8 shots to start off the performance.  I don’t really know the whole Red Lion Story, but what I was told is Phil Long used to be just an entertainer that starred at the Red Lion.  Eventually the owners wanted out so knowing it was a virtual gold mine, he bought in with another partner.  Essentially Phil Long is The Red Lion.  Without him it would be just another pub in downtown Vail. 

So Phil performs.  He is great.  He plays the guitar, sings some great songs and the cougars dance.  That is the Red Lion.  You throw a wadded up dollar into his tip bucket from a far distance and he orders your table 24 shots to be taken by yourself and everyone around you.  It’s a great atmosphere.  As the evening was winding down, we decided to get the check and call it an amazing day.  Phil saw me with the Bill in my hand and immediately stopped mid song and called us out.  The whole bar boo’d and Phil ordered each of us a shot and a beer so we would be forced to stick around.  Within an hour Chris was up on stage with Phil singing.  2 hours later we closed down the bar and ended up in a pizza place.  I don’t remember much after that other than waking up in my swimming suit in a stairwell hoping to get back into the hot tub even though it closed at 10pm.  Security was outside and apparently I thought the stairwell would be a good place to hide out until security left.  When I woke up I decided to give up on my aspirations to continue the party in the hot water, I headed back up to the room and passed out. 

6:30 rolls around (only a few hours after I hit the bed) and we decided that if we were going to have any chance on getting back to Denver, we would have to leave by 7:30am since there was a blizzard heading to Denver and they would surely close the pass and we would be stuck in Vail.  By the time I got out of the shower I was still a wreck, but it was off to Denver.  The two hour ride turned into 4 hour and we decided to have breakfast at The Jack & Grill, which in itself is a completely seperate post.  I’ll stop here for this part of the trip and pick back up with Jack & Grill tomorrow.

FTD is dead to me.  While I was off partying the days away in Colorado, my wife was doing some crazy partying of her own in Las Vegas.  That as well will be its own post also, but once again I digress. 

When we arrive back home I decided that I wanted to send my wife some flowers to her school on Monday.  Apparently at 9:30am in the monring, it’s not that easy to have flowers delivered in the afternoon, so I settle on a huge bouquet of yellow roses from FTD to be delivered on Tuesday.  I saw on FTD’s site that they now offer to send flowers in a box or through a local florist.  Not wanting my wife to have to assemble the flowers in her classroom, I made sure to pick a bouquet that would be delivered already arranged.  Tuesday rolls around and I get a call from my wife at 4pm thanking me for sending flowers.  She didn’t sound the way she normally does when I send flowers having sent them dozens of times. 

“I thought you might want to know that the flowers were delivered in a box…”

“What?” was my response. 

“I also thought you might want to know that the flowers are dead…”

“Are you kidding me?”  I yelled.  

She replied with the whole don’t get upset, since it’s the thought that counts.  If it’s the thought that counts, then I would have cut out a picture of flowers and sent them and  saved myself 80 bucks.  She said that she had never recieved boxed flowers before and maybe the magical powder they send with the flowers will bring them back to life after she gave them water and assembled the dead flowers in the vase.  Not likely, I thought. 

So, I called FTD and was pleasantly greeted with the typical 6 dollar an hour 2nd grade education customer service person.  After 45 minutes of arguing with this woman, her only offer to make me happy was to send the same arrangement in a box.  Anything different I would have to pay more money.  So, I must have committed the cardinal sin of customer service spinning my wheels with someone that did not have the power to say yes to my request, so I finally asked for one of her bosses.  level 2 if you will.  After waiting on hold for a few minutes another woman came on the line who identified herself as a senior customer care representative, which I assume meant that she had been there longer than a month.  I once again expressed my displeasure and we quickly were able to set up something from a local florist to be delivered already arranged in a vase that wasn’t dead.  I was happy with that.  They would not refund the money since another bouquet was on the way.  Since yellow roses apparently are hard to come by, I finally just asked for some red ones to be sent and it was finished.  After the second round of flowers were delivered to my wife yesterday, everyone at her school now thinks that I must have done something seriously wrong on my bachelor party.  Nothing could be farther from the truth. 

FTD is dead to me now.  Shame on me for not dropping my money on  a local florist that needs the business to stay open in this economic shit storm that we are currently in.  I say stay away from FTD.  Even if you order something that is supposed to go through a local florist, they will send dead flowers in a box.  If you ask them why they will respond saying that you should have read all of the fine print.  Who reads fine print when ordering flowers?  Not this guy.

Filed under: Vacation, Vegas, asspain, bachelor party, beer, liar, romance, wife

I can not finish a post

Seriously.  I have begun like 10 and every time I try and wrap it up, I get sidetracked and end up saving it for later without revisiting.

I have like 10 drafts just sitting there with some of them having expired due to being yesterday’s news. 

Today I am suffering from what I guess could only be described as what I felt when I had Senioritis.  You know where you are at work, and it’s nice out side, and you don’t want to be at work, so you try and work but all sorts of non work things are running through your mind?  Yep, that’s me today.  Add to that a small basketball tournament, and I have pretty much checked out. 

I am less than a week out from my trip to Denver, and I can’t wait.  I have prepared what I hope will be the best bachelor party yet with our group of guys.  This will be the 7th destination bachelor party for this group but it’s the first non Vegas trip and the first where I am serving as Best Man. 

The trip is ridiculously packed with drinking. The highlight of the trip being a surprise microbrewery pub crawl next Saturday that has a 26 person stretch SUV limo picking the 18 of us up from the hotel and taking us on an 8 hour 200 mile round trip tour of 14 different micro breweries.  We will also be skiing in Vail and Winter Park, which should be interesting since I have skied all of once in my life. 

I would like to mention that I believe that nothing happens without a reason, and it’s very sad to hear the news about Natasha Richardson last night.  Until yesterday, I had no clue who she was.  She is an actress and after scanning her body of work (no pun intended) I understood why I have never seen anything she has been in.  The closest I have ever come to seeing any of her movies was Maid in Manhattan since that was a movie they played on an airplane as we flew to Vegas once.  I didn’t listen to the movie, but did notice Jennfer Lopez’s badonkadonk in a few scenes.  She is the wife of Liam Neeson who I am a fan of.  Natasha had a skiing accident up in Canada a few days ago.  It was first reported that she just bumped her head.  Now she is dead.  She fell during a skiing lesson on a beginner hill.  She wasn’t wearing a helmet.  

Well guess what I just added to my list of items I shall be investing in when I rent skiing equipment next week?  A helmet.  Know what else?  I doubt now that I do anything overly aggressive since I have never had a lesson.  I have no interest in dying, so I shall be a bit more cautious as I give it my first go around of skiing on a mountain. 

On a completely sepearate note, I began a post that I will wrap up about my gym.  I am struggling with all of the naked people.  I don’t know what it is, but dudes like to hang out in my locker room naked.  It is my opinion that the locker room at my gym is a hotbed of gayness and I am thinking about cancelling my membership for purely this reason.  I am in the process of exploring “old school” options such as these:

That way, when I am in the locker room my vision will be blocked as the 75 year old guy walks around with the towell in his hand and not covering his twig and berries.  I know I might be breaking guy code here, but come on!  This isn’t a matter of insecurity, just a very high level of discomfort on my part.  I asked the wife if that’s the way it is in the women’s locker room hoping to verify everything I have ever dreamed of since I was 12 years old, but she claims it isn’t.  I guess I will never know…

In other gym news, I am still baffled by the number of people that drive around the parking lot and actually wait in an aisle for several minutes so that they can get a parking spot closer to the door.  Dude.  You are going to work out.  You will be running 2 miles or lifting weights in a matter of minutes.  Is that extra 15-20 steps going to kill you?  I hate it when I walk out to my car and cars will stalk you hoping that you are occupying a closer spot.  Sadly I have found humor in fucking with these people on occasion when I am in no rush until they get pissed and gun it past me.  The timing threshold is around 2-3 minutes after I get into my vehicle. 

That’s about it.  I’m going to click publish now before something esle comes up and I this gets saved for another day as well.  Happy March Madness!

Filed under: Exercise, asspain, bachelor party, beer, stupid

Busted Knee

Typically when I go to Las Vegas, the after effects upon my arrival home last maybe a day or two, but never longer.  Maybe longer if I do very poorly at the tables and my wife gives me the cold shoulder  if I lose a good chunk of change.  But never this long. 

This story actually reminded me that I never finished explaining the craziness that was my trip to Vegas over New Years.  I will revisit the story, but for right now I will only touch upon tiny pieces pertinent to the knee. 

2008 sucked in many ways.  When I am older and look back on my life, I can’t say that 2008 will be one of the years I want to rekindle.  2008 must have felt the same about me as I did about it because at 5 minutes to midnight this past NYE, it might as well have kicked me in the groin as a going away gift.  This is what happened…

The wife and I are in Vegas.  On the 30th of December we go out for a nice dinner, back to the hotel room to hang out, and then the wife wants to go to bed around 1:30am Vegas time (which is 3:30am Chicago time so she did good for her first full night in Vegas.)  Not me, though.  As she is ready to drift off to sleep, I am getting some comfy clothes on and getting ready to head down stairs to play some Pai Gow Poker.  8 hours and 20 free Captain and Cokes later, I am drunk and up a good chunk of change.  It’s almost 10am Vegas time and I haven’t had a wink of sleep so I head back up to the room.  For this trip, I decided since it was the wife and I that I would get a suite that offered a large whirlpool tub.  If you have been to Vegas and never had the experience of recovering from an all night terror, I would highly recommend the whirlpool tub.  Three hours in and out of consciousness in the whirlpool was as good as 8 hours of regular sleep.  We get dressed and by 2pm we are out of the hotel on our way to New York New York to buy tickets to Cirque Du Soleil’s Zumanity. 

There are so many aspects of this day that should be in itself a post, but I have to get to midnight and will revisit certain aspects of this day. 

We tried to get tickets to Zumanity, but instead I found myself on a bus going to tour some property call “Tahiti Village” since my wife is a penny pincher.  3 1/2 hours later I am emotionally scarred by the boiler room sales tactics and we have tickets in hand for Zumanity and only one hour to get dressed for the show.  We see the show (totally seperate post as well) and have 45 minutes before midnight on the strip.  Head back to our hotel, change into warm clothes so that we don’t freeze our ass off on the strip, and head down to Las Vegas Boulevard to watch fireworks off the rooftops at roughly fifteen minutes till midnight. 

We are not allowed to walk over Las Vegas Boulevard since the bridges over the road are closed.  We can only exit on the street level which in hindsight was a huge mistake.  As we are greeted by a very large crowd we began to get crushed since no one was moving and everyone continued out the exit.  I decided that we are going to climb over the barrier on to Las Vegas Boulevard since it was closed to traffic.  As I force my way through the crowd with wif e in tow, I climb up the 4 ft tall barrier that has metal spikes mounted on top of it to prevent such a climb.  As I stand up to leap over, my toes catch the metal bar and I am now falling head first 5 feet down towards the pavement.  I catch myself with my hands and my left knee bangs on the ground before I do what had to have been the most ungraceful barrel roll in Las Vegas history.   I jump up to the laughter of many drunk idiots and help my wife climb on the barrier to which I lift her over and walk way with her in my arms.  Trying to be a man, even though I know I haven’t been in this much pain for many many years. 

After we get to an area where we can finally breath, I survey the damage and I have gravel embedded in my palms and blood begins to seep through my jeans where my left knee hit the pavement.  I am pretty sure that either my right wrist is either sprained really badly or fractured.  I look at my watch and at 2 minutes until midnight, 2008 delivered the biggest kick to the groin yet for what was just one shitty year. 

Fast forward now to February 1st 2009.  It’s been more than a month since Vegas and I am mostly healed.  I still have marks on my palms from the fall and there are still signs of a scab on my knee cap.  Whenever I put pressure on my left knee it still hurts pretty bad.  I began to feel my knee and to my surprise I can physically feel that my knee cap has been chipped.  A piece of my kneecap moves on my left knee that doesn’t on my right and it hurts when I touch that one particular spot right on the tip of my knee cap.  So, it’s busted.  Thanks Vegas. 

I am most concerned about the knee since I want to go see someone about it, but fear what they might say.  I am off to Denver in 6 weeks to ski for a bachelor party and the last thing I want to hear is that I need surgery to fix my knee.  But on the other hand, if I don’t go to see someone I am concerned that skiing will make it worse and I might just destroy the thing while skiing.  I don’t really know what to do.  I have two little people on each of my shoulders doing the whole “Go to the doctor” vs “don’t be a pussy” argument thingy in my brain and I don’t know which one to listen to. 

I have more going on in my brain, but no more time, so I will have to share my oriental balloon twisting competition story later.

Filed under: 15885677, 15888541, Blood, Busted Knee, Cry baby, Tahiti Village, Vacation, Vegas, achy, asspain, body, sore, train wreck, weird, wife

all over the road

This Friday finds my mind wandering aimlessly with a side of fright.  First the fright part.  Two weeks ago, my company laid off 200 employees.  For the first time in 25 years of being in business we had a lay off.  The whole situation was quite surreal.  Upon walking into the office, I opened outlook and was welcomed with an email from our CEO announcing the layoffs.  It went something like this.  “By the end of the day, 200 coworkers will be ruthlessly escorted out of the building and will have to drive immediately to the unemployment office.  We wish you luck…”  or something like that. 

Upon reading the email, the temperature in our building must have dropped a good 15 degrees and it was eerily quiet.  My first plan was to begin removing many of the electronic documents that I have saved in email and on my work computer hard drive that I would need for home.  Then I almost wanted to start cleaning off my desk so that I would be prepared if I got the call.  By 3:30 in the afternoon, they hadn’t come to me yet, so I assumed that they wouldn’t for the day and at 4:01pm I ran out of the office and drove home thinking about the poor souls that came in to work that morning not realizing that by the end of the day they would be unemployed.  I have to assume they were offered a nice severance of some sort. 

So, this morning we had our team meeting and someone announced that they had heard a rumor that round two of layoffs would be going down on Monday.  I am not one for rumors since they usually are just rumors.  The funny part of the rumor was that they would be laying off 900 people this go around.  We all discounted the rumor, but I surely left the meeting feeling uneasy about what might go down on Monday.  Even if the 900 number is absurd, I have to wonder if they will be letting anyone go.  In this current state of the economy, it would suck to be unemployed, but luckily for me I am a professional balloon twister and have a second form of solid income.  Also I have a sugar mama (my wife) that is also an amazing Kindergarten teacher.  So, I guess I shouldn’t have too much to worry about since as they say “everything happens for a reason”. 

Besides, what could happen to me can’t possibly be as bad as what ex Illinois Govenor Rod Blagojevich has gone through in the past 24 hours.  I have to assume that his inspiration to not quit while being impeached must have been from recently watching the classic film A Knights Tale, where Heath Ledger fails to quit when everyone has discovered that he truly is not a Knight only to see Heath Ledger’s character get “Knighted” for being so brave.  I wonder if Rod Blagojevich might have thought that by not quitting, he would be “Knighted”. 

I got a good laugh out of the process when he compared his situation to Dr. Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela.   He mentioned that he tried to bring perspective into his arrest last year by thinking about those leaders.  If it were me, and I was arrested for pay to play, I might be thinking about Jesus Christ instead, because when they convict him for the corruption, that might be all he has left while in Prison. 

In other news, instead of buying my wife one wii fit for Valentines day, I bought her two.  When I decided that I would get her a wii fit, I tried locating them, without much success.  I finally found one through bestbuy.com and ordered it immediately.  I was told in the confirmation email from Best Buy that delivery would not be for a week or two.  So after work I got my hair did and dropped into gamestop next door, and much to my displeasure, they had 4 in stock.  I called the wife (she obviously knows that I am getting this for her for Valentines day) and she asked me to buy the one there because she just couldn’t wait the two weeks for delivery.  So, I did.  Much to my chagriness (I don’t know what Chagrin means and I am sure chagriness isn’t a real word, but I don’t care) I received an email from Best Buy that night with tracking info for the Wii that shipped out immediately.  Tracking shows it will be at my house today.  My wife hasn’t even opened the other one yet.  I will likely be making a trip back to Gamestop tomorrow now to return one of them. 

I am eagerly looking forward to this weekend.  It’s Super Bowl weekend.  I don’t really care for once in my life since I have little interest in the teams playing this year.  I am looking more forward to the food than anything.  Since I am not twisting balloons tomorrow, I will be making home made Jambalaya, Chili, Chili Cheese Dip, Cookies, and Rice Crispy Treats to take with me to the party on Sunday. Maybe I missed a calling in my life, but cooking for 5 or 6 hours is a great stress reliever for me.  Amidst this new push for weight loss, I am giving my diet a day of rest on Sunday and I plan on consuming more calories in one day than what I have consumed in the past two weeks.  My record for chili was set last year at 6 bowls over a 5 hour period.  My anus and wife have both already begun pleading with me to let that record stand and to abort any attempt at blowing it out (yes, pun intended).  Why they don’t play the game on Saturday to give our bodies (digestive tract) a day to recover before going back to the workplace on Monday is beyond me.  But then again, maybe Monday will be a short day for me anyway.

Filed under: Anus, Fatty, Hair cut, Wii, asspain, weekend, wife, work

Overwhelmed

That is a good word today.  Overwhelmed.  Not with work, but with church crap and it’s killing me.  Somehow I inherited responsibility on a Pancake Breakfast at our church and I am overly pissed because I don’t give a rat’s ass about it.  It’s not mine.  I’m not doing anything for it.  So, as I did nothing and the event neared, the people who used to run it started a smear campaign making it appear to everyone at our church that I am dropping the ball.  This has passed the funny point because I can’t even attend the event, much less run it.  I have even gone to the extent of telling people I don’t have time.  But no one will do it. 

So, here I sit today trying to work while calling Sam’s club and Jewel osco to order 38 gallons of orange juice and 12 gallons of Milk.  I bet you didn’t think obtaining that many gallons of milk and juice could be a difficult thing, did you.  It shouldn’t be.  But for some reason when you call sam’s club and jewel osco the fine people at the customer service desk forward you to the dairy section where you will either get an elderly man that can’t hear you because he’s on the loud sales floor or you get a stocker who has no authority to handle such a complex transaction.  Thanks to the old guy, my entire sales floor now knows that I am in need ot 38 gallons of juice and 12 gallons of milk.  I have had several coworkers stop by asking me what the hell I’m going to do with 38 gallons of juice.  Why can’t I hit two different grocery stores the morning of without preordering?

What sucks even more about this is if I truly did not do anything about this event and let it fall apart, so would my name and reputation at church.  What a mess.  I am so ready to just move to a church where people have no idea who I am and I can be like a normal person and attend Mass and not have to worry about arriving before and staying for several masses to sell Pancake Breakfast tickets.

On a lighter note, I played video games last night online with strangers for the first time.  I would say it was accidental really.  Having only had the Wii set up for two days now, I am still experimenting with it and clicked on one of the Mario Kart options to which it launched a screen and within 1 minute I was racing with strangers from all over the world.  Three hours later it was midnight and time to put it away.  The last time I was this into a video game system must have been well over 15 years ago and I keep waiting for my mother to come busting in the room and screaming at me to finish my homework.  

I don’t know what it is, but by the time I got home last night, I quickly showered, cooked dinner, did the laundry, did the dishes and looked at my wife as if to say “I did my homework, can I play the Wii now?”  It’s sad that something so funny as the Wii can make me feel like a little kid again.  If I wasn’t so lean on vacation hours with our 10 day Christmas trip to Las Vegas and Phoenix coming up for New Years, I would call in sick and play that thing all freaking day.

Filed under: Church, Cry baby, Wii, asspain, grouchy, peer pressure, wife

Car buying asspain

In my life I have never bought a new car.  My wife had prior to her meeting me.  Even the car I drive around we bought used with only 11k in miles on it.  For the past week we have been car shopping and as much fun that you would think car shopping would be, it has not been that at all.  If I have to deal with another slimey car dealership guy I am going to go apeshit. 

I have learned several lessons while car shopping none of which being useful in any other facets of my life.  What I learned the most is that you can’t trust anyone in any way that is affiliated with getting a car off their lot.  My car buying process has been one big comedy of errors after the other.

The highlight of which was being told that the dealer was doing me a ”favor” by installing the remote starter for 450.00 which was a “loss” for the dealership.  When I asked for more info they handed me a pamphlet that had $224.00 underlined and circled with letters under the price spelling the words OUR PRICE double underlined.  I laughed out loud and said 450.00 is your cost, huh?  I handed the now opened pamphlet to the salesman and watched him turn red.  All I could do was just nod in disbelief. 

One lesson learned is that if you find a vehicle with the options you like and the color you like, locate the car on your own.  We told the dealer that we were test driving what options and color we wanted and we were greeted with the fact that there was only one in the Midwest that matched our specs and before they came back to tell us about it, they have “locked” it in and no other dealer could get it.  That pretty much prevented us from being able to buy that car from anyone else.  When I questioned the truth behind locking it in, the manager proceeded to call the other dealer that I had been working with and asked if they could get our model with naviagation in the color we wanted…to which the response from the other dealer said that there was one, but the dealership we were sitting in had secured the vehicle less than ten minutes before that phone call took place, thus realizing that it was another dealer on the phone and they hung up on him.  Funny shit really. 

So they drove to pick the car up yesterday and by the time everything was signed sealed and delivered, it came time for our inspection, and my wife looked over it with a fine tooth comb.  As we looked at the car, we became distraught at the number of issues found.  Dings all over the place on the interior dash, the radio looked as if somone had tried prying it off to steal, the exterior had chips, and there was a pinstripe on the car that my wife hated.  Had we actually test driven that car we would not have thought about buying it for a second.  Luckily the dealer was good about all the issues and will be fixing everything at our convenience under warranty so we ended up driving off with it last night only to have to bring it back in for a couple days work on getting in the new condition that we deserve. 

I am just glad we are done with it, because it truly was the biggest pain in my ass. 

The next time I buy a car,  I think I am going to create a “bullshit” buzzer and announce that before we begin negotiations the dealer has two free “bullshit” buzzes and upon the third buzz, I walk out.  That or there has to be some sort of lie detection device that I will set up before we begin. 

I had a math teacher in junior high would fuck with us mentally when he would call out our lies.  When you would pass your math quiz to your neighbor for grading and get you paper handed back to you sometimes someone would quickly erase the answer and write in the correct one stating that the grader messed up.  This would prompt “the eraser test” as he put it where he would take that piece of paper to the window holding it up to the light.  He would then take a medicine dropper and drop one drop of hydrogen peroxide on the answer to see if it changed colors.  Depending on how the hydrogen peroxide fizzed on the answer told the teacher whether it was changed after the fact or not.  Three different times he began the process only to have the kid crack in front of him for fear of his test proving that the student did indeed changed his answer.  One boy actually began crying and was sent to the principal’s office right then and there for lying.  If only I could use something similar with the dealer.

Filed under: Car, asspain, liar, slime