We bought a beautiful new car. It’s a gas guzzler but that’s okay, it’s red. I don’t know the difference between a Lincoln and a Mini Cooper, but I do love red cars. The salesman at the car dealership tried to foist a black one on me. I wouldn’t even open its door. It wasn’t red on the outside, so I wasn’t interested in what was inside.
I can understand how the car dealer may have mistaken my disinterest in whether or not the car actually had an engine, for stupidity. Nevertheless, I found it offensive when he explained every amenity and what was under the hood to Mighty Marc, then turned to me and said he would include a cute little bottle of red touch-up paint for the dings I’ll be making.
So, we drove the beautiful red car and it’s amenities out of the lot, not knowing how to work anything but the ignition.
Even the radio is a challenge. Every time I’m certain I’ve learned how to set it, I discover that I haven’t. The radio can be activated from my steering wheel, too, if I knew how. On the steering wheel is a group of buttons that I haven’t figured out, yet. There’s one button that I accidentally found twice. When I pushed it the steering wheel moved up and down. There’s another button that raises and lowers the accelerator pedal, although since I don’t plan on growing or shrinking any time in the near future I can’t imagine I’ll ever use it.
My red car has cruise control, as do most new cars today, but this one has cruise control like none I’ve ever seen. It’s called Automatic Cruise Control. I set the speed I want, and if my car determines that I’m driving too close to the car in front of me, it automatically slows down. Having this amenity allows me to relax and removes a lot of stress from driving. I’m tempted to try it with my eyes closed, but then I’d probably have to use the entire contents of that cute little bottle of red ding paint.
It also has a built in GPS, which I insisted I needed. Before buying this car Mighty Marc bought me a Garmin GPS unit for my other car, three years earlier. If I ever wanted to look at it I had to go to his car because that’s where he kept it; sort of like the son who buys his father a baseball bat for Christmas. One day I decided to try it. I placed it on the dashboard, punched in the destination address of a new friend, followed every command perfectly and ended up at some stranger’s house. Since we were guaranteed that such things would never happen with this expensive system, I asked the people in the house why they were there and demanded that they leave, immediately. They insisted they were the rightful owners of the house but, if I were to believe them I’d be forced to lose faith in the Garmin, which I wasn’t about to do.
The GPS Mighty Marc bought me for my birthday isn’t nice. She talks down to us. We named her something that rhymes with Witch. Because we don’t like her attitude we often ignore her directions, purposely, and then regret it.
We discovered that my new car’s GPS has a glitch. It only accepts two digit addresses, so if we need directions to someone who happens to live in a house with more than two numbers, it’s sad, but we can never see them again.
We took the new car to Manhattan yesterday, and instructed the GPS to find us a traffic-free route home. It led us through the entire tri-state area. The usual 70 minute drive took over four and a half hours. But, in my beautiful red car’s defense, we did avoid traffic.