A Photo's Worth a Thousand Words:

Or several thousand dollars.
Check it out!

To get this beauty of a car, I went through a rather traumatic process, which included traffic on the 5, dealings with the Russian Mafia of car salesmen, and several hours of rather grueling research.

Now all I have to do is get my rotten-in-the-state-of-Denmark insurance agent to call me back to make sure this baby blue is covered to the maxx!

I woke up at 7 this morning to (a) make sure it was still there (b) make sure it had no 'dings' in it and (c) make sure that the sprinklers hadn't ruined my carwash.

The 5 trip wasn't so bad. I only felt bad because my friend Kimmy was taking me to the dealership, and she had something to go to later, so I am afraid she was rather late.

The Russian Mafia, on the other hand....grrr. I went to check out a 2010 Ford Fusion (if you don't know what they look like you can check them out by going here. I liked my car salesman - very genial sort of fellow. Tried to be understanding, and all that. I went in, and I wanted a blue car. Those of you who know me know that I really like blue.

I wish I had a picture of him. His name was purportedly Alex. All his teeth were caps, unnaturally white. You could tell he was a smoker (I don't have anything against smokers, just their smoke/smell), and all the back teeth had gold caps on them. He had bear-greased hair cut in a very severe style and the accent to go with it. He looked very...Russian.

My salesman was fine. Then Alex, the numbers guy, came out, and gave me a sheet of paper. I immediately stiffened. I react very strongly to people and this guy did not bring warm fuzzies to my gut - in fact, he generated the exact opposite response. I did not want to be within ten feet of this guy, much less shake his hand to meet him. Keep in mind that the sticker price on the car was $21,599 or something. He says, okay, you qualify for the 0 down 0.0% financing. I say, sure, let's see what the payments would be. He shows me the paper and one eyebrow just went up. I figured I could figure it out - I got out my cell phone: $869.00 x 36 = $31,284.

I'd been up since 6 that morning (on a Saturday? Me? UNHEARD OF!), so granted, I was a little tired. But not tired enough to pay $10,000 above sticker price!!! I just looked at him and said, "Do you really think I'm that stupid?" to which he had no reply. He said, well, that's the numbers, and I just showed the phone to my salesman and started to laugh almost uncontrollably. Seriously, that Alex character will ruin it for poor Todd every time. By the way, they're just asking for a lawsuit, in my book...

So I tried to leave. That didn't work so well. They sent guy after guy to come talk to me, saying, what can we do to earn your business TODAY? I said, absolutely nothing, when I woke up this morning I knew I was not going to buy a car. They pushed and pushed, but to no avail. The final straw was that I'd parked my car in the service lot unwittingly and I couldn't leave...I had to come back and get one of the guys to open the gate for me.

On the other hand, I was in and out of the dealer yesterday in a little under two hours...test drive included, with the computer down. That's pretty good. And they didn't even try to sell me any extras. Yay for Commerce Hyundai!