Michelle Kaplan

It’s All A Game - Who Knew

There are some rites of passage that everyone goes though.
Birth, graduation, first kiss, first well, you know, car-shopping experience. After 98,658 miles, I had to say goodbye to one of my best friends, my Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo. Heartbreaking as that was, it was nothing in comparison to the ordeal of finding a replacement – on a budget.

You see… I’m a mother of two, who has refused to conform to the, dare I say it, soccer mom image. No, I will not throw down my keys and plant myself in a mini-van. Let’s face it, who can actually blame the kids in the Camaro next to you when you stop at a red light with some Red Hot Chili Peppers blaring out of the window and glancing at the Camaro. You catch the eye of a few teenagers with that deer caught in the headlights look on their faces, because it just doesn’t add up, Mini Van plus Chilies does not equal cool…more like fool.

So, maybe it’s midlife crisis. If I have to give up my jeep, I’m going to get a convertible, so I thought, but reality has a way of punching you in the gut and it just wasn’t meant to be. Of course as brave and tough as most people believe me to be, I did bring my boyfriend with me to go through this sacred rite, after all if you don’t have to go it alone, you shouldn’t…And not just because of the “woman alone, get ripped off by smarmy car salesmen” thing…yeah, some of them really are…but because of the waiting, which I couldn’t figure out until my boyfriend hipped me to the groove.

Before this I believed that doctors cornered the market on the waiting game, with the coffee service at Starbucks coming in at a close second of course, but nothing compares to the waiting at the dealership. They keep you waiting about 50 minutes per episode. By episode I mean the steps of buying a car.
The first 50 minutes is the actual looking driving and finding the suitable replacement. The next 50 minutes is the appraisal period, kind of like the Middle Paleolithic, complete with the Neanderthals and lasting almost as long. The next 50 minutes is the “I’m going to level with you period.” This is their version of the reality check when they tell you that your car isn’t worth near where you thought it would be. But the key here is to not be insulted; it’s all part of the big game. Which reminds me, you got to be on your game and have that game face on because this my friends is the big leagues. The next stage of the game I like to call the Houdini phase. They all kinda disappear until you finally go looking for them. It’s about this time when I started to wonder just what’s going on. So I ask the boyfriend, what the hell are they doing, what’s the deal with the wait? This is where he tells me it’s all “part of the game.” Of course he’s into sports, so I’m not sure if he’s just trying to relate it to me in “sports talk” or if he really thinks there’s a game going on here.

Finally he explains to me that they are keeping us hostage there, it’s not my imagination. It’s to keep us from having time to go someplace else and shop. “OH”! That was when the light bulb went off. Later relaying this to another friend of mine, he confirmed the hostage situation by telling me of the time he was in a dealership and they told him they had “lost his keys,” until he finally threatened to call the police, then when the dealer opened the drawer in his desk the keys magically appeared. See Houdini. Ok, so I wasn’t on my game, I didn’t know I was playing one.

Since the whole thing was a game, it ends up the way I view football. After watching a game, I’m wiped out, tired, confused and not sure who won or why. Well, sadly, I didn’t get the convertible, but I’m proud to say that when I’m blaring the Chilies, the Beasties or the Stones, it won’t be coming out of a mini van.