So, I’m aware that I’m complaining about something I shouldn’t be complaining about. Buying a car. Most people don’t whinge half as much as I do about a simple process which is, frankly, a situation I should be grateful for, not one where I should be complaining. I have earned enough that I can borrow enough money to be able to buy a bottom of the barrel hybrid, or, were I less of a ethical person a pretty damn nice second hand car (actually, I could borrow much more than that and buy a much nicer car, I just don’t want to).
Not phenominal, but something mid-range pleasant and a few years old.
But I won’t.
I want something that at least stands vaguely near my ethics. I am loathe to buy a car anyhow, I wish that the frickin’frakin’Austin had worked out better, but having spent the better part of a month in a garage waiting, waiting, waiting for it to be fixed I’m now forced to conclude that it’d be unwise to put it back on the road and then attempt to rack up infinite miles in it. Not because I don’t think it would cope. It probably would and probably would be adequately reliable. Until something important broke, and then I’d be back to ‘oh shit, I can’t earn anything’. This week, for example, I was intending to spend doing agency work. I’d set myself up mentally with ‘lots of agency shifts’. Now I could have hired a car for the week and done it, but it’d’ve cost me at least the entire value of a single shift and then I’d have the bonus paranoia of ‘I MUST WORK EVERY SHIFT’ to try and make the money back. And if I didn’t get a shift… ooh the stress.
So I’ve been looking at cars.
Which it turns out, are mainly in London.
Which is, it turns out, a pain in the ass.
I mean, not so much of a pain in the ass as if they were scattered all across the country (there is one in Glasgow, but it’s highly suspicious and sporting the all bad ‘Master Warning Light’ error). But it means trying to get from Bristol to London at a ‘sensible’ time in the morning, which means forking out large quantities of cash so that I can run around London looking at cars.
If that is, anyone will let me look at them. Which I can’t ask yet because I’m still waiting to see if the test equipment (Toyota’s official software and a not-official USB connecting car-diagnostics lead that says it works with the official software) arrive. Ebay says they will. But I’m locked in this endless cycle of checking Ebay, Autotrader and Gumtree to see if the cars I’m interested in have been sold (one has) or new cars have been added, or the price has changed…
…because I’m not yet in a position to arrange actually looking at the cars.
Of course, all of this is because of a plan that we have.
It’s a good plan. Well, no, it’s a terrible, insane, batshit crazy plan. It’s the sort of plan that requires: A Kickstarter. Absolute faith in our technical abilities. A complete absence of sanity. Loads of time. And attempting to do something insanely stressful potentially at the same time as having a relatively new baby. All simple stuff, really.
When I told Nikki about it, she said we were off our rockers, or somesuch similar comment. And it’s true, we are. Nikki: WE ARE NOT SHARING IT WITH THE WORLD YET!
We have much preparation to do before we can consider kickstartering it. It links in with The Electric Minor Project. It links in with getting us to the US. Hence the ‘we need to save up some money’, which given the way the ConDem government are starving the NHS of money isn’t going to happen; and given the way they’ve cut my pay for successive years, isn’t going to happen. So a secondary stream of income, i.e. agency work, needs to be more thoroughly tapped.
Hence the need for the kind of car that will rack up moon and back milages without dying. Although one of the cars I’m looking at has already been to the moon, we’d just be starting the journey back :-/
Incidentally, LJ readers, I’m aware of the double-line spacing issue. Having problems with the crossposter (again).
