So, I had my first fender-bender in more than 6 years (a woman from a wealthy neighborhood yet with no insurance rear-ended me with her SUV when she apparently thought a red light meant "no, go ahead, keep going even though the car in front of you has stopped because why drive carefully when you know your insurance has lapsed?"). Ruined my Christmas break and I'm very pissy right now. But this isn't about that.
What this reminded me of was my previous car. Specifically, my "tolerance/hate" relationship with it (I can't call if love/hate). Whereas yesterday my reaction regarding my Passat was along the lines of, "Dammit, my beautiful unblemished car!!", with my Nissan, my reaction woulda been, "SIGH ... what is it this time?"
My Nissan was supposed to be a huge step into adulthood and personal independence. I was 26, and this was the first car I was buying completely on my own. My car at the time, a Dodge Shadow, was one my parents had bought while I was in college. I test drove several different brands with Trish and Brian to narrow down my choices, and guided by them, the semi-sporty Nissan 200SX became the frontrunner. We test drove one and took it to giant empty parking lot, where Trish and Brian taught me how to drive with a stick shift (I'd only driven a stick once before out of necessity, learning on the fly with Trish and Barbara in another car following me, but that's another story). The dealer only had a couple of models on the lot, and none were in the colors I wanted. So I chose the Royal Blue option in the brochure, shown in the middle of the photo below (yes, I still have the brochure almost 12 years later):
Royal Blue ... on paperClick photo to enlargeA few weeks later, I went back to the dealer to pick up my first-ever set of brand-new wheels. And it didn't take long for things to go south. I walked in, and there beaming at me in its shiny fresh-paint glory, was a Bright. Purple. Car:
Royal Blue...??Click photo to enlargeI asked if there was a mistake. No, that was the correct color, I was told. I stared at this purple beast feeling totally screwed. I'd already bought it. I'd already traded in the Dodge. And now I was gonna have to drive this purple thing?!
In retrospect, I can see there's a purple undercurrent to the brochure color, especially when compared with the royal blue shown in the previous year's catalog (yes, I still have that as well). And a two-inch swatch isn't the same as seeing it on an entire car. And as I would learn over the next few months, at night the color deepened to a dark blue with a purplish tint, almost what was in the brochure. When the lighting was just right. But during the day, there was no way to call it blue. Other than blue mixed with red to form purple. Brian and others coined the term "blurple" to describe my car. But no matter what the name, the car that was supposed to change my life wasn't what I thought it'd be.
Even discarding the daily reminder that I didn't get the car I thought I was getting, the negative experiences outweighed the positive. About 1,000 miles out of warranty, when it was just over 2 years old, the car's alternator died. The reason it died? Someone had jammed one of the plugs in wrong. And just a few months earlier, I'd taken it to the dealer because the check engine light was on, and they'd said they double-checked all the electrical connections. So their tech presumably did a poor job on my car and forced a plug back in, which caused the alternator to die prematurely. And not only was it just a couple months out of warranty when it died, but I couldn't prove that it was their fault.
Oh, and I should mention that when the car died because of the alternator, I was just outside La Grange, 65 miles away from Austin. On my way to Houston. To catch a flight. For a 3-week family trip to Indonesia and Australia. And I was stranded with a worthless car 120 miles from Houston with all my luggage and 6 hours to catch my flight.
To be fair, I
was very lucky it died where it did, literally on the outskirts of La Grange within walking distance of a few stores. Had it died just 10 minutes earlier or later, I would've had a long walk ahead of me in the Texas summer sun (I didn't have a cell phone yet ... this was 1998 and I was too cheap). Thanks to one of my sister's college friends, I made it to Houston about an hour before my and my sister's flight. And I had the car towed to Trish and Brian's house, where it sat for the next month. (It was easier than towing it to my apartment, since I wouldn't even be there to make sure it arrived).
In order to take this vacation, I had to take one week unpaid. So that plus the repair and towing costs made for a very happy me when I got home.
Not long after, I was involved in a weird accident where a car in the onramp ahead of me mysteriously stopped dead in its tracks. So I stopped too. No choice. Then the other car took off. But before I could get going again, a pickup truck hit me. This left the trunk unopenable, and I wasn't able to open the trunk again for years. (As I said, I was cheap, so instead of getting it fixed, I pocketed the money I got from the pickup driver's insurance).
On a more positive note, I avoided a major accident by sheer instinct. I was in the 2nd left turn lane. Our light turned green, so I prepared to move forward. But something in my peripheral vision on my left seemed amiss. Plus, the car to my left suddenly stopped. So I did too. The car to my right didn't. And that's when a car going 60 on the cross street ran their red light and plowed into the car on my right, which had pulled into the intersection. I felt a slight shudder when the blur of the car went in front of me, and there was a slight scrape on the front of my bumper. My guess is that the car running the red just barely swiped me before it hit the car on my right. Or maybe the scrape was just a coincidence and they never touched me. Either way, a big near miss, and not one I hold against the blurple at all.
Then there was the big accident, when a girl ran a red and plowed into the rear passenger side of my car, spinning me around.
The last strawClick photo to enlargeI had a green arrow, but she cried her way out of blame. After the accident, she said her light was red. She told the cop it was yellow. And his police report said hers was green. (It also said I was white). And my side wasn't helped by an overzealous friendly witness who, in trying to help confirm my blamelessness, ended up muddying the waters and inadvertently put me on the brink of being blamed. From the cop's report, the only reason I didn't end up being blamed was because he couldn't actually prove I didn't have a green arrow any more than he could prove she had a green light, since the only evidence was the conflicting stories of different people. Still, her dad's insurance company had a collection agency try to get money directly from me ... for HER accident.
But the curse of the blurple didn't stop there. My insurance adjuster was lazy at best. He almost never called me back, never gave me updates, and didn't seem to be fighting for my side against hers at all. I had to call him to get any sort of status. And after weeks of him telling me the police report wasn't in, I went to the station myself and got the report, which had been on file for awhile. Isn't that something your adjuster's supposed to do? The car itself took 2 months to fix, or about twice as long as estimated, because the body shop kept ordering the wrong parts. My insurance only paid for 1 month of a rental, so I ended up borrowing Tamara's car for a couple of weeks and relying on people to take me places the rest of the time.
The hassle of fighting not just the police report and the girl's insurance but my own uncommunicative adjuster and the slow-as-molasses body shop wore me out, and I decided that despite having the car for less than 6 years, it was time to ditch the blurple once and for all. But then I learned through Carfax that my car had been totalled. Six months earlier. In Dallas. So I had to get the state to fix that clerical error, because I couldn't sell my car if it had already been totalled. And finally, I sold the car to Bob. Which should end the story of the curse of the blurple.
Except that Bob got into an accident a couple years later (though as he said, he was making a turn where he wasn't supposed to). Fixing it was too expensive, so he sold it to a coworker. Who parked it on the street. And whose neighbor had it towed ... from a public street. And Bob's coworker decided it wasn't worth the impound fee, so he left it there.
So that was presumably the final resting place for my blurple car. I'm sure from there it was torn to bits and sold for parts and scrap. Which seems fitting for the ol' blurple beast. I haven't missed it one bit.
Labels: Cars, Life
