So, I dropped my car off at the dealer this morn­ing for some repairs.  The trans­mis­sion is fUx0r3d.  Both third and fourth gear will not engage.  They make lots of neat sounds, as if I have never touched a stick shift, but they never engage.  I thought I would have to pay for repairs, but I was wrong about the war­ranty.  The trans­mis­sion is cov­ered under a 5yr/60k plan.  Nifti­ness.  That would have been at least a grand that would have had to go on the plastic–and I have very nearly paid off all the plastic.

While get­ting a ride to work from BC, I came across sev­eral dis­cov­er­ies.  First is the Smoker's Post.  Phalic jokes aside, this seems pretty cool.  It was out in front of the gas sta­tion, is made in an old-fashioned style I really like, and would sure beat the big ash­tray with a moun­tain of cig­a­rette butts that cur­rently sits out on the front porch.

The next dis­cov­ery was a crazy spoiler on a lit­tle boxy hatch­back Honda (I think it was a Honda, at least).  The pic­ture will be forth­com­ing, but it was basi­cally the St. Louis Arch above the square hatch­back of this lit­tle car.  I have seen spoil­ers on all sorts of sporty and pseudo-sporty cars, but not on a car like this.  I hope the dri­ver has a sense of humor because I would be a lit­tle scared by the guy who would seri­ously put this on his car.

The final obser­va­tion was again from the gas sta­tion.  It looked like there were two broth­ers that kept going in, get­ting scratch-off lot­tery tick­ets, then return­ing out­side to scratch them off.  Blather, wince, repeat.  Dur­ing the 10 or 15 min­utes we were there for BC to pur­chase and add oil to the bus, these guys ended up repeat­ing the cycle 8 to 10 tines.  I have seen peo­ple do this before, but it is typ­i­cally late at night and the peo­ple doing it look one step away from home­less.  These guys looked well-to-do–nice clothes and shoes, cell­phones clipped to their belts, well-groomed hair, etc.  I hope that if/when I become job­less, I do not hang around the gas sta­tion try­ing to make it big with the Lotto.

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Tagged as: car, transmission