The day on the car lot seemed so promising: a nice family willing to pay a little too much for the smallish car, the joy felt from the driver controlling a manual transmission, a protected spot in an organized garage....
It was all a facade.
The driver continually forgets that she is no longer in an SUV. She does not have plenty of room to straddle things that might be in the roadway. The first was a torn off tire on I20. It wasn't her fault; she was trapped in fast moving traffic and had no room to swerve. The encounter ripped the front plastic protector from under the car. She didn't realize it was so bad and drove all the way home and to school the next morning making a terrible scraping sound on the pavement. The junior high students laughed. It was humiliating.
Today was an incident in an alley. Little cars aren't supposed to traverse sandy, rocky alleys. She doesn't think before she drives. What she saw was a seemingly small piece of pavement in a mound of sand. She drove around it on the way into the alley. She talked to her son who was in a backyard doing some work and then jumped in the car and took off. Like I said, she doesn't think, just looks at the clock and flings herself in the direction she needs to go. She failed to avoid the broken piece of pavement that proved to be bigger, like an oval basketball sized, rock. She also drove full on into the sand....deep sand.
An alarming sound sent her son out of the backyard thinking she had experienced a blown out tire. What he found was a car spinning its tires and throwing out something akin to smoke with a red faced driver frantically trying to go, go, go.
He dug the tire out of the sand, gawked at the piece of pavement sporting scrape marks, and pushed so she could leave the alley finally. This time she rolled down the windows to see how the car sounded as it drove. Not good. Sand in the brakes? She had no idea what it was, until she hit a bump and it became louder.....she knew then what it was. The scraping again.
This time, it was a HUGE piece of plastic that looks like it was supposed to protect the whole underside. She, embarrassed, parked in the back of the deserted high school parking lot and walked about a 1/4 mile around to the front for in-service. Her husband had started coaching meetings and got an unwelcome call. She hates to interrupt, but.....
In the middle of the inservice she received a text from her husband, "I think it's mostly driveable now. Love you."
If this car could text, "Thanks for the memories, but have mercy on me and please trade up to something taller!"
I should, I admit it.
