Wednesday, November 29, 2006

I get back from Thanksgiving Vacation on what must be the coldest day of the year; thirteen degrees. You know its cold in Seattle when the temperature is less then the age of the last girl you dated. I'm sure that sounds bush league for most of you. I can routinely handle single digits myself. I guess its something in the northwest, with how wet it is already, when it gets cold, it does so suddenly, transforming the landscape into the Sherbet Forrest. Then add in the windstorms and holy Britney Spears snatch is it cold!

To get to work that first day I have to first excavate my car from the five days of snowfall it's under. I also don't have an ice scraper so I patiently allow my trusty twenty-three year old defroster unit to form a thin aura of heat around my car so I can pull off sheets of compacted snow. When I leave work it has somehow gotten colder, and that melting snow has stayed with my car to form my next puzzle.


Representation, not actual car. I mean, not actually my car.
It is impossible to unlock either door with the key and even if I could there was nothing to get enough leverage to pull the door open. I had to go in through the hatch; the key hole miraculously being unfrozen. As I'm crawling in through the back, the hydraulic hold open rod is rendered inoperable because of the cold and possibly gross vehicle neglect, so the door is bouncing up and down off of my squirming body as if the car is eating me.

I get in and turn on the car. On the inside, the door lock isn't one of those knobs sticking up by the window, it's a small flap near the door handle. I try to unlock the door, and with a combination of low temperatures and my untamed animal like strength I snap off the lock without actually unlocking the door. Think of any cartoon where they try to pull the break on an out of control train, and the bar snaps off. That was me.

Somehow the passenger side lock is fine, but I have to kick the door open. At lot of good this does me as now I can get goosed by the stick shift when I want to get in and out of the car. At the 80 minute mark the windows become capable of being wound down and the key hole is defrosted enough to free myself.

Conceivably, I can still lock the car from the outside if I'm so inclined, but nothings ever going to happen to it. There's nothing but garbage inside of it, half the lights are busted, the wheels are permanently misaligned, and there's barely any paint remaining on it. This all in addition to the already recursive exhaust system and the crushed in rear end. I calculated it out and I save $7.23 every day I use that car over something I'd be more interested in. If you're wondering that's 36 Wendy's chicken nuggets, per day. For that, I'm content to drive it until I'm skidding down the highway in nothing but the driver's seat, holding a disembodied steering wheel.