by Dave Barry
—SCAN—
“… followingisbasedonan800-
yearleaseanddoesnotincludetaxtags-
insuranceoranactualcarwegetyour-
houseandyourchildrenandyourkidneys …”
—SCAN—
“NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS!!! BUD LOOTER CHEVROLET OPEL ISUZU FORD RENAULT JEEP CHRYSLER TOYOTA STUDEBAKER TUCKER HONDA WANTS TO GIVE YOU, FOR NO GOOD REASON …”
—SCAN—
“… Bill Doberman. He’ll work for you. He’ll fight for you. If people are rude to you, Bill Doberman will kill them. Bill Doberman …”
—SCAN—
“… enjoyed those 54 classic hits in a row, and now let’s pause while …”
—SCAN—
“… insects DID swarm upon them and DID eateth their children, but they WERE NOT afraid, for they trustedeth in the …”
—SCAN—
“… listening audience. Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Go ahead.”
“Steve?”
“This is Steve. Go ahead.”
“Am I on?”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“Is this Steve?”
—SCAN—
“This is Bill Doberman, and I say convicted rapists have no business serving on the Supreme Court. That’s why, as your congressman, I’ll make sure that …”
—SCAN—
“… a large quantity of nuclear waste has been spilled on the interstate, and police are trying to …”
—SCAN—
“… GIVE YOU SEVENTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS IN TRADE FOR ANYTHING!!! IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE TO BE A CAR!!! BRING US A ROAD KILL!!! WE DON’T CARE!!! BRING US A CANTALOUPE-SIZED GOB OF EAR WAX!!! BRING US …”
—SCAN—
“… huge creatures that WERE like winged snakes EXCEPT they had great big suckers, which DID cometh and pulleth their limbs FROM their sockets liketh this, ‘Pop,’ but they WERE not afraid, nay they WERE joyous, for they had …”
—SCAN—
“… just heard 317 uninterrupted classic hits, and now …”
—SCAN—
“Bill Doberman will shrink your swollen membranes. Bill Doberman has …”
—SCAN—
“… glowing bodies strewn all over the road, and motorists are going to need …”
—SCAN—
“… FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!!! WE’LL JUST GIVE IT TO YOU!!! FOR NO REASON!!! WE HAVE A BRAIN DISORDER!!! LATE AT NIGHT, SOMETIMES WE SEE THESE GIANT GRUBS WITH FACES LIKE KITTY CARLISLE, AND WE HEAR THESE VOICES SAYING …”
—SCAN—
“Steve?”
“Yes.”
“Steve?”
“Yes.”
“Steve?”
—SCAN—
“Yes, and their eyeballs DID explode like party favors, but they WERE NOT sorrowful, for they kneweth …”
—SCAN—
Bill Doberman. Him good. Him heap strong. Him your father. Him …”
—SCAN—
“… finished playing 3,814 consecutive classic hits with no commercial interruptions dating back to 1978, and now …”
—SCAN—
“… the radiation cloud is spreading rapidly, and we have unconfirmed reports that …”
—SCAN—
“… liquefied brain parts did dribbleth OUT from their nostrils, but they WERE not alarmed, for they were …”
—SCAN—
“… getting sleepy. Very sleepy. When you hear the words ‘Bill Doberman,’ you will …”—
POWER OFF—
OK, never mind. I’ll just drive. Listen to people honk. Maybe hum a little bit. Maybe even, if nobody’s looking, do a little singing.
(Quietly)
I can’t get nooooooo
Satis-FAC-shun …
WHERE YOU CAN STICK THE STICKER PRICE
We are attempting to purchase a new car, and I have just one teensy little question: WHY WON’T THEY TELL YOU HOW MUCH IT COSTS?
I mean, let’s say you’re in the market for a rutabaga. You go to the supermarket and there, plain as day, is a sign stating the price of the rutabaga, allowing you to decide instantly whether it is in your price range. If it is, you simply pay the amount and take your rutabaga home, and you hurl it into your garbage disposal. At least that’s what I would do, because I hate rutabagas.
But when you walk into a car dealership, you are entering Consumer Hell. There is no easy way to find out what the actual true price of any given car is. Oh, sure, there is a “sticker price,” but only a very naive fungal creature just arrived from a distant galaxy would dream of paying this. In fact, federal law now requires that the following statement appear directly under the sticker price:
WARNING TO STUPID PEOPLE:
DO NOT PAY THIS AMOUNT.
The only way to find out the real price is to undergo a fraternity-style initiation. First you squint at the sticker, which lists the car’s 163 special features, none of which you could ever locate on the actual car because they all sound like rocket parts, as in “transverse-mounted induced-torque modality propounders.” Then a salesperson comes sidling toward you in an extremely casual fashion (do not attempt to escape, however; an experienced car salesperson can sidle great distances at upwards of 45 miles per hour) and chatters on at length about the many extreme advantages of whatever car you are looking at (“It has your obverse-shafted genuine calfskin bivalve exuders”). But if you ask him the true price, he will make some vague, Confucius-type statement like: “Dave, we are definitely willing to go the extra mile to put a smile on your face.”
“But how much does it cost?” you say.
“Dave,” he says, lowering his voice to indicate that you and he have become close personal friends. “Frankly, Dave, (name of whatever month it is) has been a slow month, and I think, Dave, that if we sit down and cut bait, we can come up with a number that we can play ball with.”
“WHAT number?” you say. “TELL ME THE NUMBER.”
“Dave,” he says, “I think if we both pull on our oars here, we can put the icing on the cake while the iron is still hot.”
The easiest solution, of course, is to simply pull out a loaded revolver and say, “Tell me how much this car costs or I will kill you,” but unfortunately it is still a misdemeanor in some states to shoot a car salesperson. So eventually you have to start guessing at the price (“Is it more than $9,500?”). It is very similar to the childhood game Twenty Questions, only it takes much longer, because instead of saying “yes” or “no,” the salesperson always answers: “Let me talk to my manager.”
The manager is comparable to the Wizard of Oz, an omnipotent being who stays behind the curtain and pulls the levers and decides whether or not the Cowardly Lion will get a free sunroof. I have never heard a conversation between a manager and a salesperson, but I assume it goes like this:
SALESPERSON: He wants to know if it’s more than $9,500. Can I tell him?
MANAGER: How many times have you called him “Dave”?
SALESPERSON: 1,672 times.
MANAGER: Not yet.
So it can take hours to determine the true price, and this is just for one car. If you want to find out the price of another brand of car, you have to go through the entire fraternity initiation all over again. And there are hundreds of brands of cars out there. Thousands of them. Back when I was a child and Abraham Lincoln was the president, there were only about four kinds of cars, all of them manufactured by General Motors, but now you see new dealerships springing up on a daily basis, selling cars you never heard of, cars whose names sound like the noise that karate experts make just before they break slabs of concrete with their foreheads (“Hyundai!!”).
So far, the cars we have looked at include: the Mimosa Uhuru 2000-LXJ. The Mikado Sabrina Mark XVIXMLCM, and the Ford Peligroso, which is actually the same as the Chevrolet Sombrero, the Jeep Violent Savage, and the Chrysler Towne Centre Coupe de Grace, and which is manufactured partly in Asia (engine, transmis
sion, body) and partly in the United States (ashtray). They are all fine cars, but at the present time, based on our discussions with the various salespersons, we find ourselves leaning toward the rutabaga.
LEMON HARANGUE
TODAY’S CONSUMER TOPIC IS:
How to Buy a Car.
The First Rule of Car Buying is one that I learned long ago from my father, namely: Never buy any car that my father would buy. He had an unerring instinct for picking out absurd cars, cars that were clearly intended as industrial pranks, cars built by workers who had to be blindfolded to prevent them from laughing so hard at the product that they accidentally shot rivets into each other.
For example, my father was one of the very few Americans who bought the Hillman Minx, a wart-shaped British car with the same rakish, sporty appeal as a municipal parking garage but not as much pickup. Our Minx also had a Surprise Option Feature whereby the steering mechanism would disconnect itself at random moments, so you’d suddenly discover that you could spin the wheel all the way around in a playful circle without having any effect whatsoever on the front wheels. Ha ha! You can imagine how I felt, as an insecure 16-year-old with skin capable of going from All-Clear Status to Fully Mature Zit in seconds, arriving at the big high school pep rally dance, where all the cool guys had their Thunderbirds and their GTOs with their giant engines and 23 carburetors, and there I was, at the wheel of: the Hillman Minx. A car so technologically backward that the radio was still receiving Winston Churchill speeches.
You don’t see many Minxes around anymore, probably because the factory was bombed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. You also don’t see many Nash Metropolitans, another car my father bought. The Metropolitan was designed by professional cartoonists to look like the main character in a children’s book with a name like Buster the Car Goes to Town. It was so small that it was routinely stolen by squirrels. It was not the ideal car for dating, because there was room for only one person, so the other one had to sprint along the side of the highway, trying to make casual conversation and sometimes dropping from exhaustion. Being a gentleman, I always made sure my dates carried flares so I could go back and locate them at night.
Of course today’s cars are much more sophisticated, by which I mean “expensive.” This is because modern cars employ all kinds of technologically advanced concepts such as measuring the engine in “liters.” Let’s say you buy a car with a “5.7-liter engine” This means that when it breaks, you should not ask your mechanic how much it’s going to cost until you’ve consumed 5.7 liters of a manufacturer-approved wine.
The most important consideration, in buying a new car, is the rebate. This is one area of automotive technology where America still reigns supreme. A lot of Japanese cars don’t even have rebates, whereas some American car dealerships have become so sophisticated that they no longer even sell cars. You just go in there and sign legal papers for a couple of hours and get your rebate and your zero-percent financing with no payments due until next Halloween, and you drive home in your same old car. Ask your automotive sales professional for details. He’s clinging to your leg right now.
NO! JUST KIDDING! The last time I jokingly suggested that there was anything even slightly unpleasant about buying a car, several million automotive sales professionals wrote me letters threatening to take all their advertising out of the newspaper and jam it up my nasal passages. So let me state in all sincerity that as far as I am concerned these people are gods, and car-buying is the most legal fun that a person can have while still wearing underwear.
But it can also be confusing. There are so many brands of cars today, with new ones constantly being introduced, not only from domestic manufacturers but also from foreign countries such as Mars. I refer here to the “Infiniti,” a car that was introduced by a bizarre advertising campaign in which—perhaps you noticed this—you never actually saw the car. Really. All you saw in the magazine ads was ocean waves, leading you to wonder: Is this a submersible car? Or was there some kind of accident during the photo session? (“Dammit, Bruce, I TOLD you the tide was coming in!”)
But no, the Infiniti ads were done that way on purpose. They wanted you to spend $40,000 on this car, plus whatever it costs to get the barnacles off it, but they refused to show it to you. Why? Because the Infiniti is actually: the Hillman Minx.
No, just kidding again. The truth is that the Infiniti ads are part of an exciting new trend called “Advertising Whose Sole Purpose Is to Irritate You.” The ultimate example of this is the magazine ads for Denaka vodka, where a haughtily beautiful woman is staring at you as though you’re the world’s largest ball of underarm hair, and she’s saying, “When I said vodka, I meant Denaka.” What a fun gal! I bet she’s a big hit at parties. (“Pssst! Come into the kitchen! We’re all gonna spit in the Denaka woman’s drink!”)
My point is that there’s more to buying a car than just kicking the tires. You have to really know what you’re doing, which is why, all kidding aside, I recommend that you carefully analyze your automotive needs, study the market thoroughly, and then purchase the car that you truly feel, in all objectivity, has the most expensive advertisement in this newspaper. Don’t thank me: I’m just keeping my job.
TRAFFIC INFRACTION, HE WROTE
Probably the greatest thing about this country, aside from the fact that virtually any random bonerhead can become president, is the American system of justice. We are very fortunate to live in a country where every accused person, unless he has a name like Nicholas “Nicky the Squid” Calamari, is considered innocent until such time as his name appears in the newspaper. Also you have the constitutional right (the so-called Carmen Miranda right) to be provided—at the taxpayers’ expense, if you cannot afford one—with an enormous fruit-covered hat. But the most important right of all is that every criminal is entitled to a Day In Court. Although, in my particular case, it occurred at night.
Let me stress right out front that I was as guilty as sin. I was driving in downtown Miami, which in itself shows very poor judgment because most Miami motorists graduated with honors from the Moammar Gadhafi School of Third World—Style Driving (motto: “Death Before Yielding”).
So I probably should never have been there anyway, and it served me right when the two alert police officers fired up their siren, pulled me over, and pointed out that my car’s registration had expired. I had not realized this, and as you can imagine I felt like quite the renegade outlaw as one of the officers painstakingly wrote out my ticket, standing well to the side of the road so as to avoid getting hit by the steady stream of passing unlicensed and uninsured motorists driving their stolen cars with their left hands so their right hands would be free to keep their pit bulls from spilling their cocaine all over their machine guns.
Not that I am bitter.
When he gave me the ticket, the officer told me that I had to appear in court. I had never done this before, so I considered asking my attorney, Joseph “Joe the Attorney” DiGiacinto, to represent me. Unfortunately, Joe is not a specialist in traffic matters, in the sense that—and I say this as a friend—he is the worst driver in the history of the world. I figured he might not be the ideal person to have on my side in traffic court:
JOE: Your Honor, my client …
JUDGE (interrupting): Wait a minute. Aren’t you Joseph DiGiacinto?
JOE: Um, well …
JUDGE: The person who had driver licenses revoked by three different states?
JOE: Well, I …
JUDGE: The person who once, during a crowded street festival in New York’s colorful Chinatown district, attained a speed of almost 45 miles per hour on the sidewalk?
JOE: Well, yes.
JUDGE: I sentence your client to death.
So I thought I’d be better off representing myself. I’ve watched “The People’s Court” for years, and I pride myself on my ability to grasp the issues involved, even in complex cases involving highly technical points of law such as, does the dress shop have to take back the defect
ive formal gown if the buyer got B.O. stains on it. In fact, I have always secretly wanted to be a lawyer. I could picture myself in a major criminal case, getting the best of my opponent through clever verbal sparring and shrewd courtroom maneuvers:
ME: So, Mr. Teeterhorn, you’re telling us that you “can’t recall” why you happened to bring a flamethrower to the bridge tournament?
WITNESS: That’s right.
ME: Well, perhaps THIS will help refresh your memory.
WITNESS: NO! GET THAT THING AWAY! OUCH!! IT’S BITING ME!!!
OPPOSING ATTORNEY: I object, Your Honor! Mr. Barry is badgering the witness!
ME (coolly): Your Honor, as these documents clearly prove, Rex here is a wolverine.
JUDGE (examining the documents): OK, I’ll allow it.
By the night of my traffic court appearance, I had worked out a subtle yet crafty defense strategy: groveling. My plan was to beg for mercy and ask for the judge’s permission to buff his shoes with my hair.
Only there was no judge. They herded us traffic violators into a courtroom with flags and a judge’s bench and everything, but instead of an actual human, they had a judge on videotape. Really. I could have just stayed home and rented the American system of justice.
The video judge welcomed us to Traffic Court and explained our various legal options in such careful detail that by the time he was done none of us had the vaguest idea what they were. Then some clerks started calling us, one by one, to the front of the room. I thought this would be my opportunity to grovel, but before I had a chance, the clerk stamped my piece of paper and told me to go pay the cashier. That was it. Within minutes I was back out on the street, another criminal release with a “slap on the wrist” by our revolving-door justice system.
The first thing I did, back on the Outside, was make an illegal U-turn.
THE DO-IT-YOURSELF DEFICIT-REDUCTION CONTEST
