My 2004 Buick Rendezvous has accumulated a fair amount of body damage over the last four years. Every day when I go to work, I stop in front of my car and quickly glance at the broken rear tail light (I backed into a garbage can), several paint scrapes and dings on the back doors (where my daughter has single-handedly managed to door-ding one third of all vehicles on the road today), and the eighteen-inch crack that is creeping up on the passenger side of my windshield (it started out very small until one idle Saturday morning when I decided to wash it- and voila, the damn thing blossomed into a cracked web so big that Charlotte could birth a billion little baby spiders on it and still have room for more).
After four years together, I have finally come to realize how much I hate my car. In fact, hate might not be vitriolic enough to convey my feelings for a silver piece of space junk that’s spent so much time in the shop that I’m now on a first-name basis with the manager of the local Enterprise Rental Car franchise. I’ve seen soap box derby cars engineered and put together better than this vehicle. I’m also pretty sure that the design team behind my weathered hunk of metal and rubber was not only hitting the bottle on Friday afternoons, but every single day of the week. In other words, if these bozos had built Noah’s Ark instead of Buicks, there wouldn’t be a fucking animal walking around on the face of the earth today…
Here are just a few of the brilliant features included on my SUV-wanabee:
A battery that’s so hard to reach, a cardiologist could change out your aortic valve faster than me trying to attach jumper cables to the posts. By the time I finished jump-starting my wife’s minivan half-a-dozen times this winter, my hands looked like I had run them through the meat grinder at the local Kroger’s store.
A funky plastic knob for adjusting the driver’s seat that falls off every other day, and I still haven’t figured out exactly what it does adjust when the damn thing stays on. If I wasn’t so afraid that this do-nothing knob was my car’s linchpin, that one stop-gap device which keeps my Buick from running head-on into a 1985 Peterbilt carrying a load of hogs to slaughter, I would have thrown the damn thing away years ago.
Two compartments for storing four pairs of sunglasses. Who in the hell carries four pairs of shades in their car? Maybe the designers were watching an endless loop of Top Gun, and thought every future Buick owner was either a test pilot or Tom Cruise.
A molded plastic piece for holding drinks that you have to slip into a plastic sleeve before firmly placing your beverage of choice in the cup holder (my "special" sleeve lasted about a week before I accidentally pitched it out the window still firmly encased around a half-empty bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper).
I could easily add another three pages of design insanities, but it won’t make feel any better. In retrospect, I only have myself to blame. I am the world’s worst car shopper. I should have let my wife, Julie, go out and buy me a car while I mindlessly spent the day watching Sports Center on ESPN. She’s a tougher sale than me, knows more about cars in general, and doesn’t view the whole buying process as a complete waste of time.
I was at my absolute worst the day I bought my car from hell. Instead of researching the vehicle on the internet, I was watching the U.S Open Golf Tournament on television and the endless play of Tiger Wood’s Buick commercials. Two hours later, I decided I was going to trade in my trusty Ford Explorer and buy something new. Maybe even something like the cool Buick Rendezvous Tiger Woods was racing around the streets of New Orleans to the tune of “I Put A Spell On You.”
My biggest mistake was probably talking about all of the things that didn’t trip my trigger during the test drive with the salesman (his name was Nate, and he looked like he was thirteen year’s old). Instead of discussing all of the negatives, I spent twenty minutes driving around Goshen talking about golf. I didn’t even object later that day when I picked the car up and found a purple sucker stuck to the fabric in the cargo hold (that would later have to be cut out with a pair of scissors), the gas tank only a quarter full, and the somewhat important fact that the car had done its first 15,000 miles of life as a rental car in San Francisco (which might explain why the shit-faced brakes had to be replaced six months later).
The rest is history. In the span of a summer’s solstice I came to despise my Tiger-inspired purchase. I’m stuck with it for at least another year or two because of the economy, and I’m going to drive it until the damn thing shudders and collapses. I have no clue what vehicle I’ll be driving after that, but you can bet the farm that Julie will be out picking my new ride while I sit impatiently at home, Tivoing through every damn car commercial featuring Tiger Woods or Buick…
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