I was on my way to work this morning, and heard a Goodwrench commercial that touted how some new Chevrolet trucks come with automatic service reminders through OnStar. It also plugged the Goodwrench Service Lane, where you take said truck for routine maintenance. And that tipped over a series of dominoes in my mind about my love/hate relationship with the automobile.
I've been a gearhead about all my life. I got into that honestly; my father drove trucks (and my brother and I would often join him on the trips he took). My brother and I had toy cars, this big box of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars and trucks and airplanes and stuff. We each had a nice little collection of model cars and trucks, too. I really got into cars when I was seven or eight; I plastered the walls of my bedroom with car advertisements I'd yanked out of magazines and taped to the paneling, and things got really hopeless.
My interests over the years have gone all around the place, and I'm now to the point where I have several interests I keep going like spinning plates, but my love of automobiles hasn't really ever left the stage. The 1957-58 Chrysler 300C/Ds still get my heart going, the 1961 and 1962 Lincoln Continentals still bring a smile to my face, and I've long promised myself that the moment I can afford one (and afford its care and feeding), I'm putting a Porsche 911 of some vintage in the garage as my weekend fun car.
So why do automobiles fill me with dread? It's not the cars themselves; it's all the stuff that surrounds them now. For one, it's become almost impossible for me to work on my own car. My little car is eight years old, and still runs as well as the day I drove her off the lot. But I'm terrified to do anything to that car other than drive it and fill it with fuel. There are so many systems built into these cars anymore -- theft protection, alarms, airbag systems, electronic sensors, you name it -- that I'm scared that one wrong move will turn my car into a 3400-pound paperweight. I grew up helping dad change the oil in our 1975 Impala ("the Impaler," as I remember that glorious ocean liner of an automobile), and I know my way around a car pretty well.
But cars aren't built for their owners to service any longer. There's so much stuff crammed into so small a space. I put a new radio in my car last year, and it was major surgery even for a drop-in replacement system; I had to pretty much disassemble the dash, and cramming all that stuff back in was a chore. There are steps you have to take, and special caution you must exercise, to avoid damaging or deploying the airbag systems. It's a mess.
Then there are the screwy, specialized components. There's a little air dam below the front bumper on my car, and it broke a couple years back. I tried to fix it, which seemed like it would be a simple afternoon job of the kind I'd done a hundred times before. One thing led to another, and I tripped the car's alarm system and its anti-burglar system, which was embarrassing and annoying. Worse, it's not like the front valence was a separate component; it was molded into the liner of the entire front wheelwell. You break a small part of it and you have to replace the whole thing. Grrr.
It would be bad enough for me to have this fear and loathing of automobiles (well, not the automobiles themselves as much as how complicated they've become), but get out on the road and it gets worse. I love driving in itself. I love being out on the road in a good car and enjoying the driving experience. But what makes it miserable is other drivers -- drivers who don't exercise courtesy or good manners, drivers who act like it's all a race, drivers who think only of themselves and don't believe in "share the road." It's awful hard for me to enjoy the drive when there's someone in a Tahoe with mis-aligned headlights blasting into my rear-view mirror, tailgating me when I'm doing the speed limit. I like Fisi, but I don't want to be crowded into having to drive like him when I'm just trying to get to work.
:: In happier news, there's two days left before a long-overdue break in the action, of about ten days' duration. I'm looking forward to it, and plan to make the best of it. There are a lot of projects around the house that have gone without love the last three months, and I hope to fix that during the time off. And maybe I'll get the chance to catch my breath, too. It's been intense.
The F399 kit (sent by one of my best friends in a box of stuff she sent a few weeks back) got completed, and here's what it looks like all finished up. There are a few places I could still touch up, but for now I'm content to leave well enough alone. It's supposed to represent one of Eddie Irvine's cars from the 1999 F1 season, when he almost won the F1 title. The photo is a little deceptive, as it's a tiny model.